Associate Professor of Music
University of Pennsylvania

Glenda Goodman is a cultural historian of music in colonial America and the early national United States. Her expertise lies in the material and textual histories of music, amateur music-making and gender, and singing and listening practices under colonialism. Her first book, Cultivated by Hand: Amateur Musicians in the Early American Republic (OUP, 2020) won the Lewis Lockwood Book Award from the American Musicological Society. She is the author of numerous articles that have appeared in top musicology and history journals, including the prize-winning articles “Bound Together: The Intimacies of Music Book Collecting in the Early American Republic” and “‘But they differ from us in sound’: Indian Psalmody and the Soundscape of Colonialism, 1651-75.” She is currently working on her second book, Contact Listening: Colonial Music in Native America, which explores the transformational role played by singing and listening in colonial-Indigenous relationships in the years leading up to the American Revolution. She is also working on a book about the circulation of three Indigenous songs over the course of 350 years, tentatively titled Notating Empire: Printed Music and the Frontiers of Knowledge, which she is co-authoring with her long-time collaborator Dr. Rhae Lynn Barnes. With Dr. Barnes, she has also published articles, co-convened the colloquy “Early American Music and the Construction of Race” for the Journal of the American Musicological Society, and co-edited a 49-chapter interdisciplinary volume on book history in the Americas, American Contact: Objects of Intercultural Encounters and the Boundaries of Book History (UPenn Press, 2024). 

Dr. Goodman is an associate professor of Music at the University of Pennsylvania, where she is also the interim Director of Graduate Study. She is a past member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, an ACLS fellow, and a UPenn McNeil Center Fellow, and is currently a Senior Fellow in the Mellon-Rare Book School Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography. She has been at the University of Pennsylvania since 2015, before which she was an ACLS New Faculty Fellow in the History Department at the University of Southern California. Prior to entering academia, Glenda Goodman was a musician (viola), studying at Oberlin and Juilliard and focusing on experimental music and contemporary classical music.