The Department of Music is pleased to announce that Nina Goodman is the recipient of the 2026 Heifetz Memorial Award. The Award was established to commemorate the life and honor the memory of Cathy Heifetz (1949-1976), who came to The University of Chicago in 1973 as a student in the Department of Music. The Memorial’s first endowment created an annual award to honor a student in the Department of Music whose associations as a member of this community have been singularly marked by a spirit of caring and helpfulness. Students are invited to submit nominations, from which the faculty selects the honoree. In 1977, the first recipient to be so honored was Jennifer Willard.
About Nina Goodman
I am a scholar partial to chasing and writing about sound. In my dissertation, I pursue sensory ethnographies and histories of (East/West) Germany and (North/South) Korea since the onset of the Cold War. I comparatively examine how people, by using sound ("sounding"), build an understanding of self and Other in nations in which the consequences of division reverberate culturally, politically, and socially in the contemporary. From bells to drums, folk music to protest songs, and film to sound/video art, people variously use sounded media as a means to mourn and memorialize the past and to make sense of the political situations in which they currently live.
I particularly follow public history offerings in urban centers such as Berlin, Seoul, and Gwangju, which increasingly transition towards an experiential learning model that necessitates audience use of sensory facilities, including sounding and listening. I carry great interest in pursuing my ethnographic and historical work through the creative media of sound recording and video art.
My research is supported by the Fulbright Program, Association for Recorded Sound Collections, UChicago Center for East Asian Studies, and UChicago Global. I have presented my work widely, most recently at the International Conference on Politics of Sound and Technology (2025) and German Studies Association Annual Conference (2025).