Biography
Cristina Magaldi is a Towson University Professor Emerita. She holds a bachelor's degree from the University of Brasilia, Brazil, a Master of Music from Reading University, England, and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles. Magaldi’s areas of study include music in Latin America, Brazilian music, music and globalization, music and nationalism, popular music, and music and gender. At Towson University she taught courses in Latin American music, music in the United States, Honors seminars in music and gender, popular music, and Brazilian music, and general education courses in world musics.
Magaldi has received research grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Musicological Society, and Towson University. She is the author of Music in Imperial Rio de Janeiro: European Culture in a Tropical Milieu (Scarecrow Press, 2004). In 2005 this book received the Robert Stevenson award granted by the American Musicological Society for the best publication on an Iberian topic. Magaldi has chapters in publications such as Brazil in the Making: Reflections on National Identity (Rowan and Littlefield, 2006) and Postnational Musical Identities: Cultural Production, Distribution, and Consumption in a Globalized Scenario (Lexington Books, 2008). She is one of the authors of the textbook Musics of Latin America: An Introduction (Norton, 2012). In 2024 her book Music and Cosmopolitanism was published by Oxford University Press.
She has presented papers in several national and international conferences and her articles have appeared in journals such as Latin American Music Review, Inter-American Music Review, Revista de Musicologia, Claves, Popular Music, and The Musical Quarterly. In 2011, her article on music and cosmopolitanism in Rio de Janeiro (MQ 92/3-4) received the Irving Lowens Article Award by the Society of American Music.
Magaldi also has articles in The New Grove Music Dictionary of Women Composers, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, and in the Musikalische Geschichte und Gegenwart. She has also worked as a contributing editor for the music section of the Handbook of Latin American Studies (Library of Congress).