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Call for Papers: [REDACTED]: 2026 Columbia Music Scholarship Conference (April 10)
The Organization of Music Graduate Students at Columbia University is pleased to announce the [REDACTED]: 2026 Columbia Music Scholarship Conference held on Friday, April 10, 2026.
We are broadly interested in exploring silences—intentional and imposed—that expand conventional understandings of how both sound and society are organized. The chilling of speech and brute coercion of academic norms toward self-censorship, driven by populist and reactionary thought, have forced us to consider these issues. How is silence produced, aestheticized, enforced, or endured, and what might attention to silences reveal about censorship and political economy, compositional aesthetics, violence, memorialization, and other key questions in music and sound studies?
Possible topics may include but are not limited to:
– Critical archival methods and the production of memory and history;
– Funding apparatuses and institutional silences;
– Materialism and materiality, decadence and decay;
– War, militarization, displacement, and colonialism;
– Class, race, gender, and social differentiation in music and sound;
– Media, aesthetics, and the production of affect;
– Agency and constraint in speaking, voicing, and listening;
– Accessibility in music pedagogy and research;
– Care, healing, disability, and prosthesis;
and ritual, tradition, religion, and mourning.
The keynote address will be delivered by Alejandra Bronfman, Professor of History at SUNY Albany. Dr. Bronfman’s research interests include the production of knowledge, racialization, and technology’s role in the amplification of marginalized voices with a focus on the Caribbean in the 20th century.
Format
We welcome abstracts no longer than 250 words from scholars, artists, musicians, and other practitioners at any stage in their careers. We are open to lecture recitals (30 minutes) and roundtable discussions (90 minutes) in addition to standard paper presentations (20 minutes). The organizing committee strongly cautions against submissions written with the use of AI. Submissions will be evaluated anonymously.
Submissions
All proposals can be submitted through this Google Form (https://forms.gle/PaZaSA7JicLB1dfj8) by January 30, 2026.
Questions regarding the conference can be emailed to cmscmusic@columbia.edu.
