American Musicological Society Honors Ellie M. Hisama

Ellie M. Hisama, Edward T. Cone Member in Music Studies in the School of Historical Studies, has been presented with an honorary membership of the American Musicological Society (AMS). Considered to be the Society's highest honor, such memberships are presented to scholars who have made "extraordinary contributions to the Society and to the study and teaching of music."

Hisama, who is spending her IAS Membership working on a book on American composer and musician Julius Eastman (1940–90), was presented with the membership "for her contributions to musicology, her distinguished teaching career, and her commitment to creating a more diverse, inclusive, and ethical profession."

The citation continues: "Equally at home in the fields of music theory and musicology, Hisama’s writings on the role of gender, sexuality, and race in musical modernity cover subjects ranging from twentieth-century modernists to hip hop. She is the author of Gendering Musical Modernism and numerous articles in publications as diverse as Music Theory Spectrum, Journal of the American Musicological Society, Jazz & Culture, and Popular Music, and Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. She has worked with communities in and around her institutions to create new archives of music and art in initiatives including Future Sound 6ix at the University of Toronto and For the Daughters of Harlem at Columbia University. She has worked with numerous regional and international bodies dedicated to anti-racist agendas in the arts and in the academy, including Atlantic Fellows for Racial Equity and Engaging Music, Race, & Gender."

Alongside the news of Hisama's honorary membership, Deirdre Loughridge, Edward T. Cone Member in Music Studies (2019–20) in the School of Historical Studies, was announced as the winner of the AMS's Ruth A. Solie Award, alongside her colleagues Elizabeth H. Margulis and Psyche Loui. Loughridge and her collaborators received the award for their volume The Science-Music Borderlands: Reckoning with the Past and Imagining the Future (MIT Press, 2023), a collection of interdisciplinary essays on music psychology that integrates scientific, humanistic, and artistic ways of knowing. AMS described the volume as "a conceptually ambitious yet clearheaded meditation on transdisciplinary methodology."

More information about the American Musicological Society's honorary memberships and awards can be found on their website.