Music
Professor Wins 2010 Woody Guthrie Book Award
 Steve Waksman, associate professor
of music, has been named the winner of the 2010 Woody Guthrie
Award for his book This Ain't the Summer
of Love: Conflict and Crossover in Heavy Metal and Punk (University
of California Press), given annually by the International
Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM).
The award, announced by Barry Shank, president of IASPM-US
chapter, was recently presented in Cincinnati during
the association's annual conference.
The Woody Guthrie Book Award
committee, which was comprised of Anahid Kassabian (University
of Liverpool), David Brackett (McGill University) and David
Shumway (Carnegie Mellon University), considered 22 books
for the award that recognizes the most distinguished English
language monograph in popular music studies published during
2009.
“The committee voted unanimously
for this book, praising its combination of rich historical
research and insightful critical analysis of music and performance,” said
Shumway, chair of the committee. “Waksman successfully
makes connections between two genres usually understood to
have little to do with each other, and in so doing significantly
revises the history of recent popular music.”
 Waksman is associate professor
of music and American studies at Smith College in Northampton,
Mass. His research and teaching interests are in the history
of U.S. popular music and popular culture during the 19th
and 20th centuries, with particular focus on music technology,
the musical production of identity, and live music performance
in the public sphere. He earned his Ph.D. from the University
of Minnesota.
Waksman is also the author Instruments
of Desire: The Electric Guitar and the Shaping of Musical
Experience (Harvard University Press, 1999). Waksman's
essays on the guitar have appeared in the Encyclopedia of
Popular Music of the World and The Cambridge Companion to
the Guitar, among other publications, and in 2008 he was
the keynote speaker at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's American
Music Masters conference honoring the legacy of Les Paul.
In 1998, his dissertation on the electric guitar won the
Ralph Henry Gabriel Prize awarded by the American Studies
Association.
IASPM is a 700-member international
organization established to promote inquiry, scholarship
and analysis in the area of popular music. IASPM-US, which
has about 200 members, publishes the peer-reviewed Journal
of Popular Music Studies (with Blackwell Publishing), holds
conferences and encourages research projects designed to
advance an understanding of popular music. |
