CALLS AND ANNOUNCEMENTS IN POPULAR MUSIC
JPMS Call for Associate “Field Notes” Editor
The Journal of Popular Music Studies (JPMS) seeks a new associate editor to work on the “Field Notes” section of the journal. Field Notes is a non-peer-reviewed section comprising solicited and pitched essays that associate editors collaboratively curate and oversee. Pieces in this section take up some current aspect of popular music culture and studies--e.g., musical biographies, Black sound, or campus protests, for example. These pieces can, and often do, take creative forms, such as interviews between associate editor and artist(s), conversations between two or more scholars, reports from conference sessions or symposia, compilations of video lectures, and roundtable discussions on a particular topic. Due to the varied form and content of this section, associate editors work with JPMS co-editors in commissioning and vetting prospective works. Associate editors serve three-year terms. This position is unpaid and probably best suited to academics with service requirements who are looking to become better connected within popular music scholarship and develop their editorial talents, but we invite applications from anyone interested who has a strong background in the field.
To apply, please send a CV and a letter explaining your interest and qualifications to managing editor Matthew Jones (matthew.jones@okcu.edu), co-editors Alisha Lola Jones (alj61@cam.ac.uk) and Benjamin Tausig (benjamin.tausig@stonybrook.edu), as well as current Field Notes associate editors Leah Kardos (L.Kardos@kingston.ac.uk), Jonathan Leal (lealjona@usc.edu), and Hilarie Ashton (hashton@gradcenter.cuny.edu) by August 1, 2025. Please direct any questions to the co-editors.
JPMS Call for Associate Book Reviews Editor
The Journal of Popular Music Studies (JPMS) seeks an Associate Book Reviews Editor. This editor will work closely with the Book Reviews Editor on editorial and managerial work related to the book review section, including deciding which books to review, acquiring copies from presses, assigning reviewers to books, editing reviews, and communicating with reviewers, presses, and the co-editors and managing editor. The Associate Editor is also responsible for overseeing a quarterly web listing of popular music books in print. Familiarity with popular music studies is required and experience in publishing is an asset. We welcome applications from scholars from groups traditionally underrepresented in academia.
The expectation of journal leadership is that the associate book reviews editor will take over as book reviews editor at the completion of a three-year term.
To apply, please send a CV and a letter explaining your interest and qualifications to book reviews editors Katie Hollenbach (kbhollen@uw.edu) and Antonia Randolph (antonia.randolph@unc.edu), as well as journal co-editors Alisha Lola Jones (alj61@cam.ac.uk) and Benjamin Tausig (benjamin.tausig@stonybrook.edu) and managing editor Matthew Jones (matthew.jones@okcu.edu) by August 1, 2025. Please direct any questions to the co-editors.
JPMS Call for Web Editor
The Journal of Popular Music Studies (JPMS), the foremost North American scholarly journal for the study of popular music, seeks a new Web Editor. The Web Editor works with the editorial team, the IASPM-US Web Editors, and occasionally the UC Press web team, and is responsible for coordinating and publishing all JPMS-related web content beyond the journal itself. Duties include:
The position requires no specialized programming or technology skills beyond basic computer literacy; however, familiarity with WordPress and the journal’s two social media platforms is helpful. Familiarity with popular music studies is also preferred. This is an unpaid position designed for academics seeking to perform service to the field.
To apply, please send a CV and a letter explaining your interest and qualifications to co-editors Alisha Lola Jones (alj61@cam.ac.uk) and Benjamin Tausig (benjamin.tausig@stonybrook.edu) by August 1, 2025. Please direct any questions to the co-editors.
Popular Music Books in Process series, 2025-2026 Call for Proposals
Since 2020, the Popular Music Books in Process series has held online events for music writers and scholars to showcase recent books or works in progress for an engaged audience. The series is a collaboration between the Journal of Popular Music Studies, the Pop Conference, and IASPM-US. There have been more than 140 Zoom events so far, almost all preserved on YouTube. We generally run biweekly from fall through spring.
We look forward to another round of presentations. If you are publishing a book in the next year, or have ongoing work to showcase, please let us know. All kinds of formats are welcome, from readings and dialogues to roundtables, always including a generous Q&A. Some authors have even incorporated live music. We ask you to make your event conversational on some level and avoid longer solo presentations. If you need ideas for interlocutors or co-presenters, we can suggest some. Our YouTube page shows the variety of strategies presenters have used. We may group authors with kindred approaches, too.
Whatever the format, our focus remains books, whether early in gestation or after publication. We want to showcase popular music writing of many kinds, keeping our communities connected, and welcoming in new participants. Presenters are asked to do their best to attend several other sessions through the season.
Please feel free to share this call with others you think might want to join in.
For Fall 2025 and beyond, email to all seven co-organizers by August 1:
— a proposal of about 300 words describing the book or books that you would like to present, along with your preferred presentation format;
— a bio of about 100 words for each participant;
— an indication of when would be best for you. Specific months or even a few specific dates are encouraged. Sessions in the fall will take place on Wednesdays at 5:30 pm ET. A time for spring is still to be determined, but circa Monday - Wednesday, 5-5:30 pm ET.
Thank you!
Kimberly Mack, krmack@illinois.edu, University of Illinois
Elena Razlogova, elena.razlogova@gmail.com, Concordia University, Montreal
Francesca Royster, froyster@depaul.edu, DePaul University
Gus Stadler, gstadler@haverford.edu, Haverford College
Alyxandra Vesey, amvesey@ua.edu, University of Alabama
Eric Weisbard, eric.weisbard@gmail.com, University of Alabama
Carl Wilson, carlzoilus@gmail.com, Slate, “Crritic!”, and other venues
Call for Proposals: Global Queer/Trans Nightlives
Special Issue of Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture, Volume 31 (2027)
Guest Editors: Paul David Flood, Alejandrina M. Medina, Christina Misaki Nikitin
As music moves, we groove. Or, perhaps more accurately, as queer/trans people in a musical world, we're moving with music across, through, and between nation-states, hemispheres, and a deeply interconnected and globalized world. Following Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, we are interested in how “The queer [and trans] world is a space of entrances, exits, unsystematized lines of acquaintance, project horizons, typifying examples, alternate routes, blockages, incommensurate geographies” (1998, 558). And yet, we recognize that any queer/trans utopian project, the longing and desire for an alternative to our cisheteronormative world, must also be attentive to the stratification of intimacy, capital, and solidarity in our complex queer/trans worlds. Similarly, as nightlife scholars, we acknowledge that while partying provides a safe haven in which we can be ourselves and take refuge from the cis- and heteronormativity of everyday life it also serves to reject, regulate, and discipline marginalized queer/trans people. Thus, our attention to global queer/trans nightlife grooves in the interstices of race, class, ability, migration status, nation of origin, HIV status, and history of sex work while indulging in the simultaneity of promise, possibility, pleasure and their respective failings.
This special issue of Women and Music will both contribute and respond to recent scholarship on queer/trans nightlife in music and performance studies (Maus et. al 2018; Barz & Cheng 2019; Khubchandani 2020; Livermon 2020; Adeyemi, Khubchandani, and Rivera-Servera 2021; Garcia-Mispireta 2023; Leslie Santana 2025) by exploring the sensorial, musical, and political affordances of queer/trans nightlife on a global scale. By engaging music studies’ recent global turn, we consider the circulations of racialized and gendered agency in local and global contexts to decenter normative subjectivities across economies of music, sound, and performance. Attention to the global as a framework highlights the peripheralization of alternative definitions of queer/trans, performance, intimacy, and temporality across multiple geographies. By learning from those who party on the peripheries, this special issue will reveal how nightlife affords capacious, multiplicitous, and otherwise definitions of queer/trans, shedding light onto the complexities of identity formation and maintenance through musicking and performance.
We invite proposals for short article-length contributions (6,000-8,000 words) that may address one or or more the following topics/areas:
Musical performance in/and queer/trans nightlife spaces
Queer/trans nightlife and diaspora
Sexual economies in/of queer/trans nightlives
Modes of exclusion/inclusion in queer/trans nightlife (e.g. rainbow washing)
Conversations with DJs, drag queens, party organizers, and other nightlife laborers
Topics relating to globalization, glocalization, (neo)colonialism, and other transnational queer/trans politics
New methods in queer/trans theory, nightlife research, and/or music studies
Transnational tensions of different paradigms in gender and sexuality
Culturally specific and local conceptualizations vs LGBTQIA+ rhetoric
Projected Timeline
Mar. 31, 2025: CFP launch
June 2, 2025: CFP deadline
Aug. 2025: Decisions announced
Jan. 2026: Drafts due to editors
Mar. 2026: 1st round edits (internal)
Jun. 2026: Peer review
Dec. 31, 2026: Final submission date
We particularly encourage scholars based in Africa, Asia, Oceania and South America to submit proposals. All proposals and manuscripts must be in English.
Proposals of approximately 350 words, accompanied by biographical sketches of no more than 150 words, must be submitted through Google Forms by June 2, 2025.
Please send any and all questions about the call to the guest editors at globalqueertransnightlives (at) gmail (dot) com
Let Your Body Move to the Music: Popular Music and the Body
2025 International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM) Canada Conference
Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU), Toronto, ON
October 16-19, 2025
Early submission deadline (for possible funding consideration): April 15, 2025
Submission deadline: May 1, 2025
Submit IASPM 2025 proposals here!: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdA8-o5fR8ghL2sXceAXa9GWcAPVwjklOKsyMoIupH6CwV0uA/viewform
Alternatively, submit proposals to: iaspmcanada2025@gmail.com
The body has been central to Popular Music Studies since the field’s inception, as the experience of musical participation is not only an auditory process but involves a bodily engagement with sonic properties. For Susan McClary, this is precisely where the politics of music reside: where musical sound and bodies interact and where normative behaviours, subjectivities, and logics are destabilized. This conference explores the capacious theme of popular music and the body. How do our bodies mediate, enhance, and/or limit our interactions with popular music? How are practices of music-making, listening, and dancing tied to bodily capacities and desires? How does participation in popular music produce, resist, and disseminate logics of bodily norms and deviations?
In addition to those that address broad questions about popular music and the body, we encourage submissions that relate to the following themes:
The Program Committee welcomes proposals for submissions on all popular music topics, not just those specified above.
Submission Guidelines:
Abstracts of individual papers, workshops, performances and other presentations should be no longer than 300 words. The program committee is especially interested in proposals in diverse formats. Panel submissions should include a title and abstract for the panel (300 words max.) as well as titles and abstracts for the individual papers on the panel. All abstracts for a panel should be submitted together, with one member or respondent designated as the chair. Abstracts will be adjudicated individually, so it is possible for a panel to be accepted but not an individual paper and vice versa. Each abstract should also include a short biography of the author (100 words max.) including the institutional affiliation, if any, and email address of each author. Each abstract should also include five keywords. Submissions in French and English are acceptable. IASPM Canada uses anonymized peer review to vet proposals.
Submit proposals to: iaspmcanada2025@gmail.com
Presentation Logistics and Modality:
Papers will be limited to 20 minutes followed by 10 minutes of questions. Panels will be limited to a maximum of 4 papers. Other presentations (workshops, film screenings, roundtables, etc.) will generally be limited to 60 minutes, but alternatives can be proposed. All participants must be members of IASPM-Canada at the time of the conference. Membership information is available on the following website: https://www.iaspm.ca/signup.
For questions about the conference, please contact the Program Committee Chair Richard Sutherland (rfsutherland@mtroyal.ca) or Local Organising Chair Craig Jennex (craigjennex@torontomu.ca)
Program Committee Members:
Richard Sutherland, Chair (Mount Royal University)
Melissa Avdeeff (University of Stirling)
Steven Baur (Dalhousie University)
Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier (University of Victoria)
Craig Jennex (Toronto Metropolitan University)
Charity Marsh (University of Regina)
Danick Trottier (Université du Québec à Montréal)
Popular Music Event Sponsorship Program
Call for Applications
IASPM-US
The U.S. branch of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music is pleased to offer financial support of up to $2,500 for graduate student-led events that promote wider engagement with current research on popular music, broadly conceived. Conferences, invited lectures, workshops, roundtable discussions, lecture-performances, or other events that invite collaboration across disciplinary, geographic, and/or institutional boundaries are eligible for support. All events receiving support must list IASPM-US as a sponsor on their program and marketing materials. Calls for applications will be circulated twice per year, in the Fall and in the Spring. Whereas the Fall application cycle was open to all IASPM-US members, the Spring 2025 cycle is restricted to proposals from graduate students.
Applicants must be current members of the IASPM-US branch in good standing with the organization. Events with open calls for participation and those that are accessible to the public will be given priority.
Applications are due April 15, 2025, and should be sent to Theo Cateforis and Kwame Harrison at tpcatefo@syr.edu and anharri5@vt.edu. Events can be in person, virtual, or hybrid. Applications must include a description of at least 250 words that outlines the intentions of the event; an explanation of how the event promotes the study of popular music; a budget; an event-planning timeline; and, if applicable, other event co-sponsors.
Midwest Graduate Music Consortium
April 18–19, 2025
University of Michigan
The 29th annual meeting of the Midwest Graduate Music Consortium (MGMC) will be hosted at the University of Michigan on April 18th and 19th, 2025. MGMC is a collaborative organization composed of the graduate students in music from the University of Chicago, the University of Iowa, Northwestern University, and the University of Michigan. This conference will include paper presentations, lecture recitals, a new music concert, and a keynote address from Dr. Frederick Reece, Assistant Professor of Music History at the University of Washington, School of Music.
The theme of this year’s conference is Musical Authenticity. This is a broad and ill-defined term, often associated with nature, genuineness, and reality. What does authenticity mean in the context of music? What constitutes an authentic performance? How does technology influence our perception of authenticity?
We welcome submissions from current graduate students in any discipline of music research, but we especially encourage submissions related to:
- Archival/Historical Studies
- Performance Studies
- Technology, Mediation, and Music*
- Identity and Music*
- Musical Appropriation
- Music as Memory/Nostalgia
- Musical Inauthenticity/Forgery*
- Authenticity and Genre*
*We also encourage submissions related to these topics in honor of the research of Dr. Richard Crawford, Dr. Charles Hiroshi Garrett, and Dr. William P . Malm.
Submissions for paper presentations should include the title of the presentation and an abstract of no more than 300 words. Proposals should be anonymized, leaving out the applicant’s name and any other identifying information. Proposals may include a single supplemental page of musical examples, figures, tables, etc., as long as these do not appreciably add to the word count or content of the proposal.
Paper presentations will be 20 minutes in length with 10 additional minutes for questions and comments. Submissions for lecture recitals should include an abstract of no more than 300 words, a program for the performance, and a list of any technical or instrumental requirements. Proposals should be anonymized, leaving out the applicant’s name and any other identifying information. Ensembles may apply jointly. Lecture recitals will be 30 minutes in length.
The deadline to submit applications is January 17th, 2025. Proposals will be evaluated anonymously, and successful applicants will be notified by February 14th if their paper has been chosen.
Submissions and questions can be directed to midwestgraduatemusicconsortium@gmail.com.
CFP for JSAM Special Issue: “Music, Memory, and Nostalgia”
The Journal for the Society of American Music (JSAM) is calling for article submissions on a special issue on the theme of “Music, Memory, and Nostalgia.” Nostalgia studies has encouraged us to explore memory, history, and recollection in a myriad of ways. Led by the work of Svetlana Boym, David Berry, Simon Reynolds, Grafton Tanner, and Fred Davis, among others, nostalgia has been broken into several currents (restorative and reconstructive, displaced and inherited, individual and collective, simple and reflexive) in order to understand the complexities and the politics surrounding yearning, longing, memory, and loss.
This special issue brings together research that examines the presence of nostalgia(s) on memory and music making and its impact on contemporary cultures, audiences, and identity construction within the Americas. In an era of remakes, re-enactments, repetition, re-imagining, and reboots, this issue endeavors to showcase how nostalgia has become a significant cultural marker and methodology in showcasing attitudes and creative approaches to the past.
Themes for exploration might include:
Music in the diasporas
Gastromusicology
Music and media
Archives and collections
Music and embodiment
Music, migration, and border crossing
Protest and movements of resistance
Identities (race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality, disability)
Nationalism and cosmopolitanism
Music and sports
Music and monuments
Environmental change and solastagia
Please submit a 250-word proposal abstract by August 5, 2024 to jsameditor@gmail.com Proposal abstracts will be reviewed for potential inclusion in the journal. All authors will receive a decision by September 3, 2024. Authors that will be included in the volume should expect to have their full submissions prepared by January 31, 2025. Articles will then be evaluated by the Journal of the Society for American Music in a double-blind peer review process.
Send questions to jsameditor@gmail.com
Grief is an emotional response that arises in the wake of a significant loss. While it is often thought of as an individual experience, it can be collectively experienced as well. Grief is closely associated with the death of a person, but it can result from any significant loss, including, for example, the loss of a relationship, a homeland, or a dream for the future. In light of the many losses and potential losses currently facing humanity – from war to climate change, and from extremist politics to mass casualties – a discussion of grief feels both timely and urgent.
While grief is a universal human experience, expressions of grief vary by culture. Music is often interwoven with grief, and it may serve, for example, to express or process grief. Musical practices at times of loss and grief can also tell us much about cultural beliefs, values, ethics, and ideologies. However, grief literature is overwhelmingly produced from within the “psy-” disciplines, focusing on the psychological experience of grief, on the individual over the social, and on grief within the Global North. Therefore, we invite proposals for book chapters on music and grief, welcoming contributions from diverse disciplines with particular attention to the social and the cultural, as well as varied approaches to the study of cultures of music and grief.
Themes that might be addressed (all should be considered in terms of their relationships with music)
Proposals should include a title, proposal (350 words max), author name, and affiliation by September 30, 2024. Please also include a 200-word biography. Send proposals to heather_sparling@cbu.ca. The co-editors, Drs. Heather Sparling (Cape Breton University) and Andrea Shaheen Espinosa (Arizona State University), will inform authors of accepted abstracts by October 31. Full chapters are due April 1, 2025.
Call for Papers: Chicago Music: Histories, People, and Scenes
AMS Pre-Conference Symposium
Submission deadline: April 1, 2024
November 13, 2024
Holtschneider Performance Center
DePaul University
2330 N. Halsted
Chicago, IL
We invite scholars, musicians, and arts programmers from diverse disciplinary perspectives to submit proposals for “Chicago Music: Histories, People, and Scenes,” a symposium to be held at DePaul University School of Music in Chicago, IL on Wednesday, November 13, 2024, prior to the American Musicological Society meeting, and sponsored by the AMS Popular Music Study Group and DePaul University. The symposium focuses on four themes that invite consideration of how music has impacted and been shaped by Chicago’s unique culture, economy, geography, history, and people:
Chicago music histories
Festivals
Public arts programming
Identities, neighborhoods, and communities.
The goal of the symposium is to foster conversations among participants from diverse disciplinary backgrounds and establish a groundwork for documenting and understanding Chicago’s musical life in its full richness.
The City of Chicago has been an important migratory and trade crossroads in North America, and as such, an influential city for many musical genres, including art music, blues, gospel, house, industrial, jazz, polka, punk/hardcore, soul, technobanda, and many others. Furthermore, power dynamics framed by factors such as class, ethnicity, geography, gender, race, religion, and sexuality, among others, contributed to the ways in which these scenes developed across city neighborhoods. In this symposium, we wish to highlight the significant historical trajectories, institutions, politics, people, and communities that have shaped the city’s music scenes. Music has played a central role in Chicago’s public cultural life since the 19th century, including large-scale public performances such as the Chicago Jubilee, organized by Patrick S. Gilmore, in 1873 to commemorate the city’s rebirth after the 1871 Chicago fire, the construction of architectural monuments to performance, such as the Auditorium Theatre in 1889, and the founding of major cultural institutions such as the Chicago Symphony. Neighborhood institutions have long supported local music scenes, such as South Side churches and dance halls that supported the growth of gospel, blues, and jazz, which blossomed into national and international genres. Industries such as music publishing, piano manufacturing, and recording studios flourished in the 20th century. In the 21st century, a variety of institutions support and promote Chicago’s music scenes: for-profit venues and festival promoters; non-profit arts organizations; community music schools and post-secondary conservatories, colleges, and universities; and civic bodies such as the Chicago Parks District, the Chicago Public Library, and the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE). There is much exemplary scholarship that focuses on specific genres of Chicago music. And yet, there are few if any sources that document and contextualize a cross-section of the city’s musical life. Chicago’s music scenes deserve closer attention, particularly from scholars engaged in discourses that transcend boundaries of genre and historical period.
Presentations will be limited to 15 minutes, followed by a generous amount of time for discussion after each panel. Proposals of 250 words are due April 1, 2024, and should also include a brief (three or four sentence) biography. Please email text or Word files (no .pdfs), along with any questions, to chicagomusicsymposium2024@gmail.com. Notifications are expected by May 2, 2024. The organizers anticipate co-editing a proposed volume that includes contributions from this symposium.
Program committee: Kate Brucher (DePaul University), Andrew Mall (Northeastern University), and Michael Allemana (University of Chicago and University of Illinois at Chicago)
Website: Chicago Music: Histories, People, and Scenes: https://amspop.wordpress.com/2024/02/09/ams-pmsg-2024-pre-conference-symposium/
Call for Chapters
Popular Music and Politics in the UK
Ian Peddie (editor)
Popular Music and Politics in the UK will be a comprehensive interdisciplinary volume addressing all aspects of popular music and politics in relation to the United Kingdom. The volume will examine the complexities and challenges central to questions of how politics and music have interacted, against, upon and with one another, how music and politics have functioned and evolved over time, and what this might tell us about each medium and about the societies from which such music has emerged. All approaches that attend the admittedly broad concept of music and politics are encouraged. Some possible directions might include genre studies, historical approaches, regional studies, protest music, identity politics, as well as discussions that consider the importance of gender, race, and class and various political positions and dispositions. Potential contributors should also feel free to suggest topic/approaches/themes for chapters. Completed chapters will be c. 6, 000 – 8, 000 words in length.
Proposals of 300 words should include:
Deadline for submission of abstracts/proposals: May 31 2024
Send your proposal to: ian.peddie@sulross.edu
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