Professor Nym Cooke received his B.A. magna cum laude in music history from Harvard College, and his Ph.D. in music history/musicology in from the University of Michigan, where he studied with Richard Crawford. Work on his doctoral dissertation, "American Psalmodists in Contact and Collaboration, 1770-1820," was supported in part both by a Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship and by a Frances Hiatt Fellowship at the American Antiquarian Society. 

Prof. Cooke's areas of specialization are American music history, particularly 18th-century New England psalmody, early 20th-century music, and late 20th Century popular song. He has edited the complete works of Timothy Swan (1758-1842) as volume 6 of the national series "Music of the United States of America," published by the American Musicological Society, and he contributed a chapter on early sacred music to the Cambridge History of American Music (Cambridge University Press). His articles and reviews appear in The Journal of the American Musicological Society, American Music, Fontes Artis Musicae, the New England Quarterly, The Quarterly Journal of Music Teaching and Learning, and elsewhere; he has contributed to The New Grove Dictionary of American Music, The New Oxford Companion to Music, American National Biography, the Encyclopedia of the North American Colonies, and the Encyclopedia of New England Culture. 

Prof. Cooke was among the faculty for the NEH-sponsored 1992 college teachers' institute at Boston College, "Rethinking American Music: New Research and Issues of Cultural Diversity"; in the same year he was awarded a major NEH fellowship to conduct research at the American Antiquarian Society for a book on early American sacred music. He served as Program Chair for the 1994 meeting (in Worcester) of the Sonneck Society for American Music; he has read papers at the annual meetings of that Society, and also for the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife, of whose 1984 Proceedings he was an editor. 

Prof. Cooke has conducted and lectured on early American choral music for historical societies all over New England; and he served as Music Director for the 1993, 1994, and 1995 Midsummer Revels in Lincoln, Mass. In 1992 and 1993 he directed and produced the world premieres of two music-theater pieces by his father, Francis Judd Cooke. His collection of Christmas carols for part-singing, Awake to Joy!, was published in December 1995 and recently saw its third printing; a second edition is in progress.  Dr. Cooke has also taught courses in music history at Assumption College and Brandeis University.