SANJEK STUDENT PAPER PRIZE

The Prize: The David Sanjek Graduate Student Paper is presented each year at the annual IASPM-US meeting to the student who has written and delivered the most outstanding paper at the conference. The winner of the prize receives a cash award and is formally announced and recognized at the conference’s general business meeting.

The Prize honors David Sanjek, who passed away in 2011. Sanjek was a longtime IASPM-US member who served the association in many important capacities: as secretary, vice-president, and most notably president from 1995-1998. As the director of the BMI Archives from 1991-2007, and later on as Professor and Chair of the Salford Music Research Centre from 2007-2011, Sanjek straddled the lines of the professional and academic worlds of popular music studies throughout his career, publishing on a variety topics ranging from the history of the recording industry and music business to blues, rockabilly, rock ‘n’ roll and much more. Sanjek was also a constant presence at IASPM-US conferences, where he engaged in lively Q&A with panelists and audience members, always furthering and pushing the discussion in interesting and enlightening directions. It is in this spirit of intellectual dialogue and enrichment that the Graduate Student Paper Prize has been named in honor of David Sanjek since 2012.

Eligibility: Any student who presents, in person, a formal paper at the IASPM-US meeting is eligible for the prize. A student shall be defined as a person pursuing an active course of studies in a degree program. This includes persons who are engaged in writing the doctoral dissertation but not those who are teaching full-time while doing so. Student applicants must be members of IASPM-US.

Application Process: To apply for the prize, candidates must electronically submit a copy of their paper as it will be presented at the conference along with a brief bio (75 words) and copy of their conference registration receipt. Paper submissions should be in Word or pdf format. The paper deposited is to be the version that is read at the conference and may not exceed twelve double-spaced pages (roughly 3,900 words). The Sanjek Paper Prize committee will announce specific deadlines and submission information in advance of the annual conference.

2025 WINNER

Kelly Hoppenjans, University of Michigan

With a critical eye towards questions surrounding the human, Hoppenjans’s paper “A Self-Replicating Pop Star? Grimes AI and Voicing Humanity” positions AI voice technology as an entry point into understanding identity and a narratable self. Voice technology has reshaped how we hear, inviting new questions about the relationship between sound and person. Hoppenjans’s paper offers ethnographic narratives of singers engaging with Grimes AI tool and personal autoethnographic notes to choreograph an empirical and intimate understanding of the limits, stakes, and possibilities produced by new AI technologies. Hoppenjans lets us know that the stakes are already different for marginalized groups who are structurally positioned outside of notions of the ideal Human. Ultimately, what we see is that that Grimes AI “blurs boundaries between machine and human” and unsettles how we understand humanity.

Kelly Hoppenjans is a fourth year PhD candidate in Musicology at University of Michigan. Her research interests include 21st century pop music, voice, and digital studies, and she has presented at IASPM, SEM, National Association for Teachers of Singing, and AMS. Her dissertation focuses on voice-transforming technology in pop music, including AutoTune, distortion, sped-up versions, and AI voice clones, and the way artists explore their humanity, emotion, and identity through and despite these voice-altering technologies.

PREVIOUS RECIPIENTS

2024: Paul David Flood, Eastman School of Music: “‘Everybody Wanna Move Like Us!’: Performing Afro-Sweden in the Eurovision Song Contest, 2019-2021”

2023: Tamar Ballard, Virginia Tech: "'I Just (Really) Wanna Feel Myself/Somethin'": Queering Internet Time and the Black Spectacular"

2022: Cibele Moura, Cornell University: "'O Proibidão Do Bolsonaro:' The New Right's Cannibalization of Transgression"

2021: Lee Kimura Tyson: "Trans Vocal Authenticity and SOPHIE's Hyperreal Voices"

2020: Conference and awards canceled because of Covid-19 pandemic

2019: Kyle DeCoste. “Music All Up and Down the street: Listening to Childhood in James Baldwin’s Little Man, Little Man”

2018: Ryan Shuvera. “Southern Sounds, Northern Voices: Distorting Borders Through Country Music”

2017: Peter Graff. “Seven-Eleven at The Globe: Articulating Black Identity in 1920s Cleveland”

2016: Amy Coddington. “‘Hip-hop, Got Turned Into Hit Pop’: How Crossover Radio Stations Influenced the Growth of Rap in the Late 1980s”

2015: Mandy Smith. “Drumming Is My Madness’: The Primitive in Late 1960s Rock Drumming”

2014: Yvonne Liao. “Port sounds: Jazz(-scapes) in 1930s and 1940s Shanghai”

2013: Elliott H. Powell. “Hip Hop’s South Asian Disembodied Voice: Sampling, Temporality, and the Career of Raje Shwari”

2012: Kathryn A. Ostrofsky. “Taking Sesame to the Streets”

2011: Elizabeth De Martelly. “Gay Play: Gay for Johnny Depp and the Performance and Consumption of Ambiguous Sexualities”

2010: Brian Fauteux. “‘New Noise’ versus the Old Sound: Manifestos and the Shape of Punk to Come”

2009: David Blake. “Internet Music Criticism as Archive: Pitchfork Media and Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane over the Sea”

2008: Vilde Aaslid. “The Rise of the Jazz Lament”

2007: Till Krause. “Radio Goethe: State-Supported Cultural Export of ‘German Popmusik’ to the USA as a Tool of Cultural Diplomacy”

2006: Maria Sonevytsky. “Leather, Metal, Wild Dances: Ukrainian Pop’s Victory at the 2004 Eurovision Song Contest and the Politics of Auto-Exoticism”

2005: N/A (No Conference)

2004: Shana Goldin-Perschbacher “Meshell NdegeìOcello and Black Female Masculinity”

2002:  (1) Elaine Hayes. “Chirps, Chickadees, and an Occasional Shouter” (2) Jacob Smith. “Dance Dance Revolution” (3) Lisa Soccio “The Newest ‘Very New Music’: From Duchamp’s Musical Errata and Fluxus at Weisbaden to Post-Rock in Chicago”

2001: N/A (No Conference)

2000: Christina Baade. “‘Victory through Harmony’: Dance Music for Workers in Wartime Britain”

1999: (1) Theo Cateforis. “Welcome to Poptopia: Power Pop and the Mining of Rock’s Past” (2) Jason Hanley. “NEO GEO: Ryuichi Sakamoto and the Globalization of Music”