Glenda Goodman

Glenda Goodman is an Associate Professor of Music and Chair of Graduate Studies at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Arts & Sciences. Her research focuses on American music of the 17th–18th centuries, emphasizing material culture, gender studies, and colonial soundscapes. She earned performance training at Oberlin and Juilliard before transitioning to musicology. Her acclaimed book Cultivated by Hand (2020) explores amateur music-making in the Early Republic, winning the Lewis Lockwood Award (2021). She collaborates extensively with Rhae Lynn Barnes on projects like American Contact (2024) and studies the intersections of music, race, and imperialism.

Her interdisciplinary work includes co-convening the Journal of the American Musicological Society colloquy on race in early American music (2021) and editing volumes on book history’s global intersections. Teaching spans undergraduate surveys of US and popular music to graduate seminars on eighteenth-century studies and archival methodologies. She integrates performance background into scholarship, analyzing how music shaped colonial power dynamics, Indigenous resistance, and gendered practices.

• Education: Viola performance training at Oberlin Conservatory and Juilliard School
• Current Project: A book on Protestant sacred music and settler colonialism, focusing on Indigenous adaptation of hymnody
• Labs/Teams: Collaborations with Rhae Lynn Barnes on Notating Empire and American Contact projects