The Faculty is delighted to announce that current ERC Research Associate, Dr Jacob Olley, has been awarded the 2024 BFE Early Career Prize for an outstanding publication in ethnomusicology for his article 'Evliya's Song: Listening to the Early Modern Ottoman Court' in the Journal of the American Musicological Society 76/3 (2023): 645–703. The BFE committee citation reads:
Olley’s extensive, expansive, and extremely detailed analysis of an early-modern Ottoman source – the 10-volume, seventeenth-century account by Evliya Çelebi, Seyahatnâme – was well-written, engaging, and a pleasure to read. At the outset of his article, Olley cites Clifford Geertz’s observation that ethnography is like reading a manuscript, and cleverly and compellingly utilizes this idea to develop an ethnomusicological approach for engaging with historical materials. His article ranges broadly. It is richly illustrated with sixteenth- to eighteenth-century depictions of music at court, and it considers a wide range of literature, engaging with topical issues within the broader field of ethnomusicology that include colonialism, encounters, and “boon companionship".
Jacob’s article also garnered an honourable mention for the Jerome Roche Prize of the Royal Musical Association. Many congratulations to Jacob on both achievements.