Knyt Wins American Musicological Society Teaching Award

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Erinn E. Knyt, associate professor of music history, has been awarded the American Musicological Society’s (AMS) Teaching Award for her article “Teaching Music History to Graduate Students.” The award was announced last month at the society’s annual meeting in San Antonio, Texas.

The AMS teaching award honors an exceptional pedagogical article, book, digital, or online material by an AMS member or a citizen or permanent resident of Canada or the U.S. published during the previous two years. The work must exemplify the highest qualities of originality, theory, application and communication for the teaching of musicology or music history. Knyt’s article was published in Journal of Music History Pedagogy 6, 2016.

Award committee chair Anne-Marie Reynolds from the Juilliard School said Knyt’s article “argues that musicology graduate programs focus on the skills student will need as future scholars, but too rarely prepare them for expectations in their first teaching position. The author goes on to propose various ways a music history seminar might be structured, provides sample assignments and supporting theoretical literature, and suggests means of making the course relevant to students of diverse backgrounds. Her article has broad implications for the discipline and underscores our society’s ongoing conversation about the centrality of teaching to our mission.”

AMS was founded in 1934 as a non-profit organization to advance “research in the various fields of music as a branch of learning and scholarship.” The society has 3,000 individual members and 800 institutional subscribers from 40 nations.