AMS Awarded NEH Public Humanities Grant

The American Musicological Society (AMS) is pleased to announce that it has received a $337,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities' (NEH) Public Humanities Projects program. The program supports projects that bring the ideas of the humanities to life for general audiences through public programming. To receive NEH support, projects must engage humanities scholarship to analyze significant themes in disciplines such as musicology, history, literature, ethics, and art history, and be intended to reach broad and diverse public audiences in non-classroom settings in the United States.

The AMS will use this NEH grant to extend and grow its landmark event series, "The Many Musics of America." The series began in fall 2022 with initial funding from the National Writing Project and is designed to highlight America's musical diversity, providing historical and cultural perspectives on a wide variety of local and regional American musics. "The Many Musics of America" series focuses particularly on reaching audiences interested in the humanistic study of music, but who have not historically been well‐represented among the Society’s constituents, including music enthusiasts, K‐12 teachers, music educators outside higher education, community librarians, and professionals working at cultural and heritage institutions.

“This event series allows us to make progress on several of our strategic initiatives, including energizing our regional chapters and reaching out to public audiences,” reports Danielle Fosler-Lussier, who serves as faculty advisor and coordinator on the project.

The Many Musics of America series is anchored by the Society's chapters and study groups, which will continue to serve as organizing partners for many of the twenty-two events to be funded by the grant between November 2023 and November 2025. "We're delighted to be able to continue this amazing event series and to cast a spotlight on the inspiring diversity and vitality of American music," says Siovahn A. Walker, R. F. Judd Executive Director of the AMS. "This new grant is also great news for AMS chapters and study groups, since it means we will have more money and capacity to partner with them and support their work."

The new grant will also provide funding for related AMS professional development programs and activities. Most notably, it will fund 1) the creation of a two-year public humanities Special Project Coordinator position to support the management of the series; and 2) the establishment of two new professional development programs that will run for the life of the grant. The first professional development program, Career Development Grants in American Music, provides annual meeting travel and professional development grants for students and educators working in the field of American music. The second professional development program, to be launched in 2024, will provide professional development grants to educators at all levels to support their participation in the Teaching Music History Conference (organized annually by the AMS Pedagogy Study Group) and related programming.

For more information on the Many Musics of America public event series visit the event website.