Robert F. Byrnes
Russian and East European Institute

Halina Goldberg is director of the Byrnes Russian and East European Institute at the Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies at Indiana University Bloomington. She is professor in the Department of Musicology at the Jacobs School of Music and affiliate faculty of the Borns Jewish Studies Program, Polish Studies Center, Institute for European Studies, and the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures. 

Goldberg’s interests focus on the interconnected Polish and Jewish cultures. Much of her work is interdisciplinary, engaging the areas of cultural studies, music and politics, performance practice, and reception, with special focus on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Poland and Eastern Europe, Chopin, and Jewish studies.

She is the author of Music in Chopin’s Warsaw (2008; Polish translation, 2016) and editor of The Age of Chopin: Interdisciplinary Inquiries (2004), Chopin and His World (2017, with Jonathan Bellman), Descriptive Piano Fantasias (2021; with Jonathan Bellman); Polish Jewish Culture Beyond the Capital: Centering the Periphery (2023, with Nancy Sinkoff; see https://polishjewishmusic.iu.edu), and a special issue of the Musical Quarterly, Jewish Spirituality, Modernity, and Historicism in the Long Nineteenth Century: New Musical Perspectives, 101 no. 4 (2019), to which she contributed the article “’On the Wings of Aesthetic Beauty Towards the Radiant Spheres of the Infinite’: Music and Jewish Reformers in Nineteenth-Century Warsaw.”  She directs the digital project Jewish Life in Interwar Łódź; see https://jewish-lodz.iu.edu/.

Goldberg’s honors include 1998 Wilk Award for Research in Polish Music, 2005-06 Fulbright-Hays research grant, nomination for the 2012 Sybilla Award, Poland’s most prestigious museum award, and the 2021 H. Colin Slim Award from the American Musicological Society for article of exceptional merit for “Chopin’s Album Leaves and the Aesthetics of Musical Album Inscription” (Journal of the American Musicological Society).