Rate My Professor Halina Goldberg

Halina Goldberg is a Distinguished Professor of Music (Musicology) at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music in Bloomington, making significant contributions to Arts and Culture through her interdisciplinary scholarship. She serves as Director of the Byrnes Russian and East European Institute within the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies and holds affiliate faculty appointments in the Borns Jewish Studies Program, Polish Studies Center, Institute for European Studies, and Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures. Previously, she chaired the musicology department. Goldberg earned her Ph.D. from the City University of New York Graduate Center in 1997 and her M.A. from Queens College, City University of New York, in 1989. Her career at Indiana University encompasses extensive leadership in musicology and area studies, fostering research on Eastern European cultural histories.

Goldberg's research centers on interconnected Polish and Jewish cultures, exploring cultural studies, music and politics, performance practice, and reception, with a special focus on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Poland and Eastern Europe, Chopin, and Jewish studies. Her major publications include the monograph Music in Chopin’s Warsaw (Oxford University Press, 2008; Polish translation, 2016); edited volumes such as The Age of Chopin: Interdisciplinary Inquiries (Indiana University Press, 2004), Chopin and His World (Princeton University Press, 2017, co-edited with Jonathan Bellman), Descriptive Piano Fantasias (A-R Editions, 2021, co-edited with Jonathan Bellman), and Polish Jewish Culture Beyond the Capital: Centering the Periphery (Rutgers University Press, 2023, co-edited with Nancy Sinkoff); and a special issue of The Musical Quarterly titled “Jewish Spirituality, Modernity, and Historicism in the Long Nineteenth Century: New Musical Perspectives.” Her article “Chopin’s Album Leaves and the Aesthetics of Musical Album Inscription,” published in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, received the 2021 H. Colin Slim Award from the American Musicological Society. Goldberg has been honored with the 1998 Wilk Award for Research in Polish Music, a 2005-06 Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research Abroad grant, the 2025 Distinguished Faculty Research Award, and designation as one of six Distinguished Professors at Indiana University in 2026. She directs the Digital Scholarly Commons on Jewish Life in Pre-World War II Łódź and co-designed the multimedia exhibit “In Mrs. Goldberg’s Kitchen,” nominated for the 2012 Sybilla Award for Historical Exhibits.