Glenda Goodman

Wolf Humanities Center Penn Faculty Fellow

2020—2021 Forum on Choice

Glenda Goodman

Assistant Professor of Music

Glenda Goodman is an Assistant Professor of Music at the University of Pennsylvania. She works on the social and material history of early American music. She is the author of Cultivated by Hand: Amateur Musicians in the Early American Republic (Oxford University Press, 2020) and is currently working on a new book about sacred music and Native American Christian conversion in colonial New England and New York. She is also co-organizing a collaborative project, American Contact: Intercultural Encounter and the History of the Book, which will result in a volume and digital project. Her articles have appeared in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, the Journal of the Society for American Music, the William and Mary Quarterly, Eighteenth-Century Studies, and the Journal of the Royal Musical Association.

 

Strategic Sounds: Native American Music in the Era of Colonial Conquest

This project investigates how Native American and English music cultures changed due to the sustained pressures of settler colonialism in eighteenth-century New England and New York. This period is recognized by scholars as both foundational for the American musical canon and pivotal in the history of Native land dispossession and religious conversion. And yet, the active participation of Indigenous peoples in early American music cultures has been long overlooked, despite the fact that music accompanied intercultural encounters in arenas of trade, diplomacy, warfare, and religion. This project recovers the musical contributions of Algonquian and Haudenosaunee peoples, and in so doing, explicates how musical practices were a key mode by which they negotiated for survival, resistance, and sovereignty.