About

​Philip Gentry is a musicologist specializing in the history of music in the United States during the twentieth century, both popular and classical. He is particularly interested in theoretical questions of history, identity, and politics. He is the author of What Will I Be: American Music and Cold War Identity (Oxford University Press, 2017), and has written essays on Leonard Bernstein and McCarthyism, the musical Hamilton, and Colonial Williamsburg in the 1950s. He is currently writing a second book on 20th and 21st century performances of the colonial past and their work in contemporary political culture.

Originally from the San Francisco Bay Area, Gentry earned his Ph.D. at UCLA and taught at the College of William & Mary before coming to the University of Delaware. At Delaware he teaches the music history sequence for undergraduates; graduate seminars in research methods and various special topics; literature surveys of symphonic and chamber repertoires, and general interest courses on soul, hip-hop and LGBTQ music history. He has also served a term as an at-large member of the national council of the American Musicological Society, and two terms as president of the society’s mid-Atlantic chapter.

Gentry lives with his family in Philadelphia, where he is active in public school activism with the West Philly Coalition for Neighborhood Schools and the Our City Our Schools coalition. He also serves on the scholarship committee of Cedar Park Neighbors, and on the vestry of St John’s in the Wilderness in upstate New York.