Badyn R. Woodford is a PhD student and graduate teaching associate in musicology at The Ohio State University. His research examines the public lives of sacred music, with particular attention to how liturgical texts, ritual forms, devotional practices, and sacred repertories acquire new meanings as they move among churches, concert halls, universities, civic commemorations, recordings, and interreligious spaces.

His recent research focuses on twentieth-century sacred works shaped by war, institutional crisis, and debates over religion’s place in public life. In his research on Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem and Leonard Bernstein’s Mass, Woodford considers how inherited liturgical forms become vehicles for public mourning, ethical reflection, and critique of religious and civic authority. His broader interests include sacred and liturgical music, reception history, opera, early music, nineteenth- and twentieth-century repertories, and Jewish and Christian musical traditions.

Before coming to Ohio State, Woodford earned the Bachelor of Arts in Music from West Virginia University, where his undergraduate work combined research, teaching, performance, and university service. He presented research on sacred music, modernity, and reception at the WVU Undergraduate Research Symposium, the National Conference on Undergraduate Research, and the Virginias Collegiate Honors Council. He also served as a teaching assistant in the Honors College and developed broad experience as a bass-baritone, trombonist, choral musician, and collaborative performer.

Woodford is also active as an organist, choral conductor, and collaborative musician. He served as organist at Trinity United Presbyterian Church (Uniontown, Pennsylvania), where his work included service playing, congregational hymnody, choral and instrumental collaboration, recital programming, and public writing on the life of church music. He also works with student musicians at Harrison Central High School in Cadiz, Ohio, with particular emphasis on conducting, brass pedagogy, and leadership development. His formation as a practicing Catholic and experience across Catholic, Episcopal, and Protestant church-music contexts inform his study of how sacred music is performed, taught, and carried forward across ecclesial, academic, and public life.

Outside of music, Woodford enjoys baking, collecting vinyl records, traveling, seeking out good coffee, browsing antique and vintage shops, and exploring Gothic and Gothic Revival architecture.