Judy Tsou, Substitute Chair
- Mary Hunter, Fences, Haha's, and DMZ's
Hunter questioned whether indeed women were more likely to cross boundaries than men. She recalled observing while in graduate school that women graduate students were more often advised to take on positivistic projects while men students were encouraged to be more intellectually adventurous.
- Jessie Ann Owens, Good News, Bad News
Reflecting on what it means for an area of scholarly research to be "male-dominated," Owens remarked that, when she was in graduate school, her area, the Renaissance, was the only area available for study. There has been progress, and that is the good news. Owens admits that her initial thinking that, "If I just do my work, it will be valued and accepted" had been naive, and that there actually was and continues to be pervasive discrimination (the bad news).
- James Briscoe, The NASM and Directions in Musicology
Briscoe queried what impact these requirements might have on hiring and teaching as music programs compete for fewer music students.
- Ellen Koskoff, Views from the Margins: On Being a Jewish, Feminist Ethnomusicologist
Koskoff related her experiences in ethnomusicology dating from the "Era of the Conversion," ca. 1975, when, as an unhappy student of conventional musicology in an era when "women in musicology were still a new thing," she discovered Anthropology of Music. She elected to study a very marginal topic, an American Hassidic Jewish community. She did not encounter sexism, but also did not receive very much mentoring or help. She embraced the "Cult of the Margin," as ethnomusicologists have tended to indentify themselves vis-à-vis conventional musicology.
- Annegret Fauser, Report from a Foreign Perspective
Fauser braved the crossfire by reporting on the state of feminist musicology in England and Germany. Fauser remarked that, in Europe, the notion that women might be university-based scholars as in the U.S. is already considered an innovation, and she pointed out that there are universities in England and Germany that have never hired a woman professor. There is a dearth of women role models for younger scholars and policies are hostile to women.
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