https://www.samantha-m-cooper.com/about daily 1.0 2025-10-27 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/628d2460ac9a2c061e572de9/e1217bcf-d4c6-4931-9ca9-6c17857f8779/56397898-7307-4713-b1eb-05534287a0ac.JPG About - Samantha M. Cooper (she/her) is the Robert M. Beren Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Kansas. She completed her Ph.D. in Historical Musicology at New York University (NYU) in 2022, and subsequently held postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard University (2022-2023), the University of Pennsylvania (2023-2024), and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (2024-2025). Her research explores Jewish cultural identity in late nineteenth and early-twentieth century American opera and popular music. Her current book project, American Jews and the Making of the New York Opera Industry, 1880-1940, presents the untold cultural history of American Jewish participation in local opera’s performance, dissemination, and reception. Bookended by the establishment and democratization of the first Metropolitan Opera House (the Met) in years dually significant to American Jewish immigration history and American opera history, this monograph excavates how Jewish immigrants, émigrés, and locals from different class, linguistic, gender, and national origin demographics came to play vital roles in establishing and sustaining opera in the city. In this book, Cooper employs a combination of archival, oral history, and press research to tell a new story about American Jewish culture, one in which Jewish men and women understood the art form of opera as an appealing pathway to modern aesthetic entertainment, gainful employment, and American acculturation. Cooper has presented her work nationally and internationally at major conferences and invited talks, and her articles and essays appear in The Journal of the Society for American Music, American Jewish History, The Opera Quarterly, The Journal of Synagogue Music, The Journal of Musicological Research, The Society for American Music Bulletin, and Musica Judaica. Her research has been supported by fellowships and grants from the American Musicological Society, the Center for Jewish History, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, P.E.O. International, and the American Academy of Jewish Research. Cooper is passionate about teaching and mentoring students of all backgrounds. While at NYU, Cooper taught “Music of New York: Sounding the Immigrant Experience” for the Music Department, and “An Introduction to Jewish Music” for the Jewish Studies and Music Departments at City College of New York. She also served as a mentor of fellow international and women graduate students for NYU’s Graduate School of Arts and Science. In addition to her research and teaching pursuits, Cooper serves as the Co-Executive Director of the Jewish Music Forum, A Project of the American Society for Jewish Music, alongside Dr. Gordon Dale (Hebrew Union College - Jewish Institute of Religion). In this role, she has organized three conferences, “Jewish Music and Humor” (2018), “Psalmody Through the Ages” (2020, online), and “Music, Sound, and Antisemitism” (2025, in partnership with the Barry S. Brook Center for Music Research and Documentation) as well as over fifty programs about the interdisciplinary study of Jewish music. All Jewish Music Forum programs are free and open to the public. Cooper is also the host and producer of The Sounding Jewish Podcast. https://www.samantha-m-cooper.com/new-page daily 0.75 2022-06-15 https://www.samantha-m-cooper.com/publications daily 0.75 2025-10-27 https://www.samantha-m-cooper.com/presentations daily 0.75 2022-06-02 https://www.samantha-m-cooper.com/sounding-jewish-podcast daily 0.75 2023-03-17 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/628d2460ac9a2c061e572de9/27ac7a06-07c4-4120-88a3-31c032590b12/Blue+Simple+Striped+News+Podcast+Cover.png The Sounding Jewish Podcast - Listen Here | Instagram What does Jewish identity sound like, and why have scholars from around the world devoted their careers to studying it? The Sounding Jewish Podcast features host Dr. Samantha M. Cooper in conversation with global musicologists, ethnomusicologists and sound studies scholars who specialize in the music and sound of Jewish experience. Each episode highlights a guest’s area(s) of academic interest, preferred research methodologies, and decision to study music and sound. Our goal is to better understand what it means to be a twenty-first century Jewish music studies scholar. If you would like to be featured on the first season of The Sounding Jewish Podcast, please contact me. Guests may be asked to sign a permissions waiver, and no compensation for participation is currently available. https://www.samantha-m-cooper.com/teaching daily 0.75 2022-06-15 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/628d2460ac9a2c061e572de9/4d4841c5-cc41-427a-bf99-6c98d80cf227/Jewish+Music+Class+Pic.png Teaching - Make it stand out “If history has taught us anything, it’s that Jewish music is a dizzyingly broad and fluid category, encompassing an extraordinary range of sounds and styles and ideas and themes, from the sacred to the secular – from the normatively Jewish to the Jew-ish to the seemingly not-at-all Jewish.” ¹ https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/628d2460ac9a2c061e572de9/049c875e-bf49-4753-8283-7a6488a18685/Immigrant+Children+Singing%2C+Educational+Alliance+Archives.JPG Teaching - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://www.samantha-m-cooper.com/contact daily 0.75 2022-06-15 https://www.samantha-m-cooper.com/resources daily 0.75 2022-06-15 https://www.samantha-m-cooper.com/events daily 0.75 2022-06-02 https://www.samantha-m-cooper.com/curriculum-vitae daily 0.75 2023-09-12 https://www.samantha-m-cooper.com/contact-1 daily 0.75 2025-06-10