Juliet Pascal Glazer holds a joint Ph.D. in Anthropology and Music from the University of Pennsylvania. Her interdisciplinary research investigates the relations between acoustic technologies, value, and intersensory expertise in Italy and the United States. She teaches at Boston University and Boston College.

Glazer is currently working on a book project, Senses of Value: Sound and Circulation in Violin Crafting Communities, an ethnography of craft livelihoods and craft learning among 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 double-blind tests show that professional musicians cannot always distinguish their sounds. This makes lutherie communities key sites for learning about how financial and musical value relate to sound, technology, and sensory expertise. The book 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 books works towards an intersensory approach to sound, labor, and value.

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.

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