The Royal Musical Association and Cambridge University Press Edited Book Prize for 2025 goes to Peter McMurray and Priyasha Mukhopadhyay for their edited collection Acoustics of Empire: Sound, Media and Power in the Long Nineteenth Century (OUP, 2024).
This highly polished collection significantly shapes its field not only through exploring global histories of sound and sound technologies with new interpretations and in new contexts, but also by creating an interdisciplinary discourse embracing music, history, history of science, literature and political science against a background of postcolonial studies. Drawing on a range of methodologies, the volume consciously seeks to listen to voices that have been historically silenced while probing an impressively wide range of cultural contexts and sound sources. The volume will be relevant to a wide range of scholars well beyond its ethnomusicological core.
Read full press release here.