Pierpaolo Polzonetti is a musicologist specializing in music and food, opera, eighteenth-century instrumental music, jazz, and Cuban popular music. He is the author of Feasting and Fasting in Opera: From Renaissance Banquets to the Callas Diet (University of Chicago Press, 2021), the first book-length study to explore rituals of eating and drinking and gastronomic symbols in opera. His previous book, Italian Opera in the Age of the American Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2011), winner of the Lockwood Book Award, examines the representation of America in operas composed in Europe at the time of the American Revolution. Tartini e la musica secondo natura (Lucca: LIM, 2001, reprinted 2022), winner of the Latina International Prize in Music Studies conferred by the Petrassi Institute, is about eighteenth-century virtuoso violinist, theorist, and composer Giuseppe Tartini and his ideas about music of oral tradition and ‘natural’ harmony. Polzonetti also co-edited with Anthony R. DelDonna The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Opera (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). He is the recipient of Slim and Einstein article awards conferred by the American Musicological Society and his research has been funded by several institutions, including the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council for Learned Societies, and the Earhart Foundation.

His recent research on Cuban music—supported by the Cuban Research Institute (CRI), the Kimberly Green Latin American and Caribbean Center, and Florida International University Libraries—includes his article ”Cuban Sound Recipes: Gastronomic References in Cuban Popular Music (1913–2023)” (Revista de Música Latinoamericana/Latin American Music Review, 45/2), as well as his documentary, El Sabroso (2024), filmed in La Havana, which tells the story of a Son-music artist Adel Nuñez Castillo, who died prematurely at age 38 during the making of the film. Polzonetti has also worked in music education and music pedagogy, especially directed toward marginalized and imprisoned student populations, as recounted in his article “Don Giovanni Goes to Prison: Teaching Opera Behind Bars” (Musica Docta 2019).