Welcome to the newest addition to the many resources provided by the American Musicological Society: the AMS Career Center, and its accompanying blog, Field Notes! One of my aims as the President of the AMS is to expand our support of non-academic jobs and opportunities related to music, while improving access to information on academic positions. I am therefore delighted to introduce you to this new website, which will make it much easier to find the information you need. The AMS Career Center is the next step in the evolution of an old and much beloved resource: the AMS Announce Listserv. For many years, the AMS Announce Listserv was a major source for information about career and employment opportunities in musicology and music administration. If you subscribed, email notices arrived in your inbox every few days with information about calls, conferences, job opportunities, and more. It was an invaluable resource and I encouraged all of my graduate students to subscribe.
The new AMS Career Center does everything the old AMS Announce Listserv did and more. Like the old listserv, on the Career Center you can set up alerts that will deliver regular notices of professional opportunities right to your inbox. However, unlike the old listserv, which was completely uncurated, now you can control the flow of email. If you are only interested in job opportunities, you can filter out everything else. Even better, you don’t have to receive notices directly or wait for them to arrive. You can go to the AMS Career Center site at any time and search for information and opportunities that interest you.
The AMS Career Center will spotlight a wide range of opportunities, while the Field Notes blog will feature stories, resources, interviews, videos, and other posts about many various different career tracks, options, experiences, occupations, and publications. Together, the Career Center and Field Notes provide information about both non-academic and academic opportunities and a whole range of possible careers.
The Career Center offers a searchable hub for all kinds of opportunities:
- Calls for papers and manuscripts
- Calls for award nominations
- Conference information
- Graduate programs in music studies
- Fellowships and scholarships
- Grants and subventions
- Job notices for:
- Academic jobs, including tenure-track positions, postdoctoral fellowships, research projects, teaching positions, freelance work, internships, and volunteer opportunities
- Non-academic jobs, including positions in libraries, arts administration, and commercial and nonprofit organizations, plus work in translation, grant writing, program notes, reviews, and editing
- Promotional notices for conferences, research projects, prizes, graduate programs, jobs, performances, fellowships, grants, subventions, and more
When visiting the site, you should first check out the Career Center’s “opportunities” page, where you’ll see a wide variety of different types of opportunities, all color-coded and easily scannable. You will also be able to create an account, set up regular alerts for announcements that interest you, and have them delivered to your inbox
The Career Center blog, Field Notes, will provide valuable career advice and information. The blog will feature stories, resources, interviews, and other items of interest to music researchers, teachers, administrators, and performers at every career stage. It will also include resources for non-academic jobs, including interviews with people who have such jobs that describe how they got there, the required skills, and how to make contacts.
Here are some examples of what we plan to publish in Field Notes over the next few months.
Professional Skills & Resources on disciplinary trends and professional advancement in academic and non-academic spaces. In forthcoming entries, AMS Executive Director Siovahn Walker will write a series of posts about creating and leading a mission-driven nonprofit organization; AMS Board Member Samuel Dorf will consider the timely topic of humanities lobbying and advocacy; and members of the AMS Committee on Career-Related issues will describe their career paths.
Interviews & Videos with authors, educators, performers, scholars, arts administrators, editors, publishers, translators, and other music studies professionals. In our first interviews, Nicole Vilkner and Emily I. Dolan discuss their recently published articles in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, and AMS Special Projects Coordinator Matt Brounley introduces Many Musics of America, a landmark project in public musicology.
Content from the AMS Archives, including lectures, performances, teaching tools, and career advice. See, for instance, AMS Board member Dwandalyn R. Reece’s reflection on her multi-decade career in the public sector as a music scholar and curator, and Emily Green and Megan Lavengood’s valuable list of resources for teaching online, originally published in Musicology Now.
News roundups of flashpoint news in the humanities and music studies.
The AMS Career Center and Field Notes will further the mission of the AMS: to build community and to support all kinds of people in their pursuit of all kinds of music-related research, and all kinds of careers.
Julie Cumming, President of the AMS, is a Professor at McGill University, Schulich School of Music. She has been involved with the AMS for over 40 years, serving on multiple committees, review editor for JAMS, and member of the Board of Directors. Her research areas include medieval and Renaissance polyphony, historical improvisation, issues of genre, and digital humanities. She has had over 60 graduate students and received awards for graduate supervision. Her husband, Lars Lih, is an independent scholar who writes on the Russian revolution.
