Juliet Pascal Glazer is a sixth-year PhD candidate in the University of Pennsylvania’s joint program in Anthropology and Music. She is advised by Professors Jairo Moreno (Music Studies) and Deborah Thomas (Anthropology). Her interdisciplinary research investigates the relations between acoustic technologies, financial and aesthetic value, and intersensory expertise in Europe and North America.
Her dissertation, Instruments of Value: Craft, Circulation, and Sensory Expertise among Violin Makers, is an ethnography of craft livelihoods and craft learning in communities of makers and restorers (also called luthiers) of violins, violas, and cellos for Western art music performance. Top performers covet violins that sell for thousands or millions of dollars, yet experiments show that blindfolded musicians cannot always distinguish their sounds. This makes lutherie communities key sites for learning about how financial and musical value relate to both sound and sensory expertise. The dissertation is based on multi-sited fieldwork in New York City (an international center for the violin market), Boston (home to the only full-time violin making school on the East Coast), and Cremona, Italy (a historic and contemporary center for violin making). It explores how luthiers on the U.S. East Coast and in Northern Italy produce instrumental acoustics and economic value through intersensory expertise—for example, learned visual and haptic skills—in addition to listening or aural skills. As such, the dissertation works towards an intersensory approach to sound and musical labor.
Glazer is committed to multimodal scholarship. She completed the graduate certificate in Experimental Ethnography at Penn and presented an audio piece about university maker spaces at the 2023 Screening Scholarship and Media Festival. Currently, she is at work on an ethnographic short film that explores the theme of the intersensorial and intermedial in luthiers’ workshops, in collaboration with Dr. Giovanni Cestino (University of Milan).
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 is currently a Benjamin Franklin Fellow at Penn. Her research has been supported by a Wenner-Gren Foundation Dissertation Fieldwork Grant. Before coming to Penn, she earned a B.A. from Yale, where she majored in anthropology. She is also a classical violinist and old-time fiddler.