Biography 

• MA and PhD, critical and comparative studies in music, University of Virginia
• BMA, viola performance, University of Michigan

Shana Goldin-Perschbacher specializes in interdisciplinary studies of popular and folk music from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. She has an ongoing interest in the uses and limitations of categories used to describe both people and music in making, disseminating, and understanding music. Her study of musical media and discourse takes shape through critical, ethnographic, analytical, and historical methods. Her book Queer Country (University of Illinois Press, 2022), winner of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music's Woody Guthrie Award for Best First Book by an Author, examines country and Americana music through queer and transgender participation by exploring themes of sincerity, genre, journey, rurality, representation, and collaboration. It was noted as one of the year's best books about music by Variety, Pitchfork, No Depression, The Boot, and Ticketmaster. New Literary History commissioned an article on this topic, which subsequently won the Marcia Herndon Award from the Society for Ethnomusicology. 

She has also published about Meshell Ndegeocello, Björk, Jeff Buckley, and ani difranco, as well as a variety of subjects for The Grove Dictionary of American Music. She is active in several professional organizations, including the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, the American Musicological Society, the Society for Ethnomusicology, and the Society for American Music.
At Temple University, Prof. Goldin-Perschbacher works with music majors, non-majors, and graduate students on popular, folk, and classical music, interdisciplinary music methodologies, cultural theory, and other topics. 

Her recent graduate advising includes:

• Daniel Carsello: Music Studies, PhD candidate. “'America in Miniature': Imagined Blackness as a Construction of Whiteness in United States Vernacular and Choral Music." Music History, M.M. 2019 Thesis advisor, “Everyone in ‘Harmony’: An Ethnographic Study of the Members of the Barbershop Harmony Society,” Milton Sutter Award recipient
• Michael Tanksley: Music, PhD 2024. Dissertation Advisor with Noriko Manabe, “Jazz and the Possessive Investment in Western Art Music: An Antiracist Argument for Sociopolitical Context in Jazz History Textbooks”
• Hannah Selin: Music, PhD 2024 Dissertation advisor with Noriko Manabe, "Biocentric Composition Techniques from the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries"
• Kait Canneto: Music History, MM 2024. Advisor, “'Baby Don’t You Like This Beat? I Made it So You’d Sleep with Me': Exploring Lyrical Sexuality in 2020s US Popular Music and Chappell Roan"
• Samuel E. McLaughlin, Music History, MM 2024 Advisor with Noriko Manabe, “'Neither to Rome nor to Moscow:' Prostopinije as Auditory Borderland in Ruthenian-American Church Communities"
• Elysia Hempel: Music History, MM 2023 Advisor, "Eeny Meeny Miney... Oh--From Blackface Minstrelsy to Sean Kingston & Justin Bieber, a Critical Examination of Bias in a Nursey Rhyme in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Popular Song
• Emiko Edwards: Piano, DMA 2022 Monograph advisor, “The Gendering of Women Pianists and Repertoire Between 1950-2019 in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania” 
• Benjamin Safran: Music, PhD 2019 Dissertation advisor, “Sounding Strategy: Composers’ Use of Social Justice and Political Themes in Contemporary Classical Concert Music,” Temple University Doctoral Dissertation Completion Grant Recipient. 2 peer-reviewed articles published. Institute Manager, Cogut Institute for the Humanities at Brown University
• Rebecca Rosenbloom: Music History, MM 2017 Thesis advisor, "Aural Substance: An Ethnographic Exploration of Regional Burn Soundscapes," Milton Sutter Award recipient

Prior to joining the Temple faculty, Goldin-Perschbacher was a music postdoctoral fellow in the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in the Humanities at Stanford University, a postdoctoral fellow in Feminist Studies at Stanford, and a lecturer in LGBT Studies at Yale University. She graduated from the first class of PhD students in Critical and Comparative Studies in Music at the University of Virginia where her dissertation was supported by an American Association of University Women fellowship. As an undergraduate at the University of Michigan she studied viola performance, English literature, and visual art.

Works and Publications 

Book

Queer Country, University of Illinois Press, 2022. Supported by a publication subvention from the Manfred Bukofzer Endowment of the American Musicological Society, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Select recognition for Queer Country:

• Matthew Jones, "Review: Queer Country, by Shana Goldin-Perschbacher." Journal of Popular Music Studies 1 September 2024, 36 (3): 135–137
• Kristine M. McCusker; Queer Country, by Shana Goldin-Perschbacher." Journal of the American Musicological Society 1 April 2023, 76 (1): 238–242
• Winner, Woody Guthrie Prize for Best First Book by an Author, International Association for the Study of Popular Music U.S.
• Certificate of Merit in the 2023 Association for Recorded Sound Collections’ Award for Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research in Recorded Country, Folk, Roots, or World Music 
• Best Music Books of 2022 by Variety, Pitchfork, No Depression, The Boot, and Ticketmaster
• Shana Goldin-Perschbacher, host and Danielle Swindells, producer, “Deep Dive into Queer Country,” BBC4 12 June 2022 
• Will Groff, “Queer Country Interview,” Pitchfork Magazine 23 March 2022

Articles in Peer-Reviewed Journals and Chapters in Edited Books

"Gay Country, TransAmericana, and Queer Sincerity," in The Oxford Handbook of Queerness and Music, ed. Fred E. Maus, Oxford University Press, 2018(online)/2022(print).

“TransAmericana: Gender, Genre, and Journey,” New Literary History 46, no. 4 (Autumn 2015): 775-803, *winner: Marcia Herndon Award, Society for Ethnomusicology, 2016

“Icelandic Nationalism, Difference Feminism, and Björk’s Maternal Aesthetic,” Women and Music 18 (2014): 48-81, *supported by an AMS publication subvention

“‘The World Has Made Me The Man of My Dreams’: Meshell Ndegeocello and the ‘problem’ of Black female masculinity,” Popular Music 32, no. 3 (2013): 471-496

“‘Not With You But of You’: ‘Unbearable Intimacy’ and Jeff Buckley’s Transgendered Vocality,” in Oh Boy!: Masculinities and Popular Music, ed. Freya Jarman-Ivens (New York: Routledge, 2007), 213-233

Reference

“Antony Hegarty,” The Grove Dictionary of American Music Second Edition, ed. Charles Hiroshi Garrett, 2013

“Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival,” The Grove Dictionary of American Music Second Edition, ed. Charles Hiroshi Garrett, 2013

“Meshell Ndegeocello,” The Grove Dictionary of American Music Second Edition, ed. Charles Hiroshi Garrett, 2013

“Olivia,” The Grove Dictionary of American Music Second Edition, ed. Charles Hiroshi Garrett, 2013

Reviews

“Ani DiFranco, Carnegie Hall 4/6/02 (2006) and Rome, Italy 11/15/04 (2005),” Righteous Babe Records. Journal for the Society for American Music, 1/1, 2007: 153-5 

Trade

Lee Bidgood, Sophia Enriquez, Shana Goldin-Perschbacher, Tatiana Hargreaves, Benjamin Krakauer, Jordan Laney, and Mark Miyaki, “How Instructors Are Including Antiracism in Roots Music Study,” No Depression 23 February 2022, https://www.nodepression.com/5-ways-instructors-are-including-anti-racism-in-roots-music-studies