Juliet Glazer

Juliet Pascal Glazer is an ethnomusicologist and anthropologist specializing in sound studies, critical organology, timbre studies, linguistic anthropology, and the and the study of labor and value in Italy and the United States. She holds a joint PhD in Anthropology and Music from the University of Pennsylvania. Her dissertation, “Senses of Value: Sound and Circulation in Violin Crafting Communities,” is an ethnography of craft livelihoods and learning in communities of makers and restorers (also called luthiers) of violins, violas, and cellos for Western art music performance in Boston, New York City, and Cremona in Italy.

Currently, Glazer is engaged in a book project that explores the multi-sensory and inter-sensory dimensions of musical labor and value production among violin-family luthiers. Relatedly, she is working on an interdisciplinary pair of articles that situate the study of timbre within linguistic anthropology by analyzing how luthiers in Boston and New York City communicate with their musician customers about timbre and sound. Her second research project asks what is at stake in “seeing” sound for historical and contemporary users of sound visualization technology. It turns to the history of science to examine the role of the sound spectrograph in ethnomusicology and linguistic anthropology, as well as in music making and AI speech synthesis, since the technology’s initial military uses during World War II.

Glazer was a Benjamin Franklin Fellow at Penn from 2019 to 2025. Her research has been supported by a Wenner-Gren Foundation Dissertation Fieldwork Grant. Her writing has been awarded the Hewitt Pantaleoni Prize for Best Graduate Student Paper from the Mid-Atlantic Chapter for the Society of Ethnomusicology (MACSEM) and recognized as “Honorable Mention” by the Society for Linguistic Anthropology for the John Gumperz Graduate Student Essay Prize. Glazer earned a B.A. cum laude with distinction in Anthropology from Yale. She is a classical violinist and old-time fiddler.