UW-Milwaukee’s Center for Jewish Studies is breaking new ground this year: The program is welcoming its first-ever postdoctoral research fellow to campus.
Samantha Cooper, who holds a PhD in Historical Musicology from New York University, begins her new post at UWM this September. Over the next two years, she’ll teach classes at UWM while she finishes work on her forthcoming book, American Jews and the Making of the New York Opera Industry.
“I’m really excited,” Cooper said. “I think it will be a great fit, and I’m looking forward to working with colleagues that are in the department, and hopefully those beyond it too.”
Fresh ideas, new perspectives
Those colleagues are just as excited to host the program’s first postdoc.
“This is something we have wanted to do for a long time,” said Professor Joel Berkowitz, the director of the Sam and Helen Stahl Center for Jewish Studies. “The opportunity came up, and we were able to secure a generous grant from Bader Philanthropies that has made it possible to create this position. … We have not hired anyone in Jewish Studies in many years, and having a postdoc in Jewish Studies gives as an opportunity to bring some fresh ideas and fresh energy to the program.”
Cooper looks well poised to do just that, he added. As they interviewed candidates for the role, Berkowitz and his colleagues were looking for someone who had experience not only with teaching and scholarship, but also with community outreach. The Jewish Studies program has strong ties to other academic programs across campus, and to many cultural and educational organizations around Milwaukee.
“We wanted to bring in someone who can help us go from strength to strength, continue to foster strong relationships that we have built, and perhaps form new ones,” Berkowitz noted. “Sam has already been doing a lot of that sort of work.”
That’s evidenced by the list of accolades to her name; Cooper has received support for her work from the Center for Jewish History, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, P.E.O. International, the American Academy for Jewish Research, and Temple University’s Feinstein Center for American Jewish History. She’s been published in The Opera Quarterly, American Jewish History, and the Journal of the Society for American Music.
She was also awarded the Association for Jewish Studies’ Jordan Schnitzer First Book Publication Award for her forthcoming book, and her dissertation received the 2024 Wiley Housewright Award for the best dissertation in the field of American Music Studies from the Society for American Music, becoming the first dissertation on a Jewish music-related subject to earn the award.
A musical background
Cooper, who is Jewish, hails from Toronto. She excelled in music from an early age, starting with voice lessons at age 4 and participating in youth choirs and theater. At the same time, she attended Jewish elementary and high schools, and found herself “looking for possible ways of putting the two pieces of myself together,” Cooper said.
She found it during a music history class in college. Her professor asked the students to sing a piece written in Latin. When Cooper saw the English translation of the words, her heart dropped.
“It was highly antisemitic,” she said. “We didn’t talk about it. We just moved on. That didn’t sit well with me, so I wrote an essay in response to the experience as my final paper. Then I started directing all of my music history work towards pairing Jewish studies with music studies.
“It wasn’t the happiest moment of my undergraduate degree, but in retrospect, I’m glad I had it,” Cooper added. “It showed me that not only could I synthesize my interests in Jewish studies and music, but that there might actually be a need for doing so in higher education.”
Since then, Cooper has become a rising star in historical musicology. She has held several fellowships, most recently at the University of Pennsylvania Harvard University, and is the Co-Executive Director of the Jewish Music Forum, a project of the American Society for Jewish Music.
She also has her own podcast.
“(It’s) called The Sounding Jewish Podcast. The goal is to amplify the voices of individuals working in the field of Jewish Studies, music, and sound,” Cooper said. “I saw a need for that in the podcasting space and though this was something I could potentially do. I’m learning as a I go, but it’s been a great experience.”
This semester at UWM, Cooper will bring all of her experiences to work for her students. She will be teaching a class called “Music, Sound, and Immigration,” which will focus on the stories of Wisconsin immigrants as told through their music.
“My hope is to learn about the city and the state while I’m teaching and go on that adventure with my students,” Cooper said.
Along the way, she’ll get to put her own stamp on UWM. She may be the first postdoctoral researcher in the Jewish Studies program, but she hopefully will not be the last.
By Sarah Vickery, College of Letters & Science