Shana Goldin-Perschbacher

Shana Goldin-Perschbacher

  • Boyer College of Music and Dance

    Music Studies

    Associate Professor

    Programs
    • Music History
Office Location

Presser Hall 319

Phone

215-204-6155

Biography 

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

Dr. Shana Goldin-Perschbacher is a specialist in interdisciplinary popular music studies and identity studies. Motivated by musical articulations of social justice issues, her explorations of contemporary sonic, visual and social media take shape through critical, ethnographic, analytical, and historical methods. Her book Queer Country, published by the University of Illinois Press in 2022, examines transgender and queer performances of country and Americana music through explorations of sincerity, genre trouble, journey, rurality, misrepresentation, masking, and collaboration. Her essay “TransAmericana: Gender, Genre, and Journey,” drawn from this project, was commissioned for a special issue of New Literary History and won the 2016 Marcia Herndon Award from the Society for Ethnomusicology. She has also published on Meshell Ndegeocello in Popular Music, on Björk in Women and Music, on a variety of subjects in The Grove Dictionary of American Music, on Jeff Buckley in Oh Boy!: Masculinities and Popular Music, on ani difranco in the Journal for the Society for American Music, and on queer country in the Oxford Handbook of Queerness and Music. She has presented at conferences including the American Musicological Society, the Society for Ethnomusicology, the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, the Society for American Music, the Pop Conference (formerly the Experience Music Project), Feminist Theory and Music, the American Studies Association, and the Trans* Studies Conference.

Goldin-Perschbacher teaches courses for music majors, non-majors, and graduate students in popular music, critical theory (especially engaging issues of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and class in relation to music and culture), interdisciplinary music methodologies, and other topics. Recent graduate student research she has advised to successful completion include:

  • 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 journal articles published, Current position Assistant Director of 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 (AY 2015-2016)
  • Emiko Edwards: Piano DMA Monograph advisor, “The Gendering of Women Pianists and Repertoire Between 1950-2019 in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.” Defended March 2022
  • Daniel Carsello: Music History, MM 2019 Thesis advisor, “Everyone in ‘Harmony’: An Ethnographic Study of the Members of the Barbershop Harmony Society,” Milton Sutter Award recipient (AY 2018-2019), current PhD advisor

Prior to joining the faculty at Temple, Goldin-Perschbacher was the first queer studies postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, the postdoctoral fellow in music in the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in the Humanities 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, and remains an active amateur chamber musician.

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.

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

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

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