Previously, she taught at Dartmouth College and at Harvard. Painter has long ties with the Center, where she was a faculty affiliate for many years and co-chaired a study group with Alexander Steinbeis called “Performance, Design and Publics in the New Europe.” She holds a Ph.D. in Music from Columbia University. Painter writes on the history of musical listening, especially in the context of aesthetics, ideology and social history. The framework for her research has involved early bourgeois musical culture, fin-de-siècle cultural debates, the World Wars, Austro-German socialism, and Nazism.