Congratulations to Dr. Alisha Lola Jones, Associate Professor of Music in Contemporary Societies, who has just assumed the role of co-editor of the Journal of Popular Music Studies along with Dr. Benjamin Tausig, Associate Professor of Critical Music Studies at SUNY Stony Brook.
About Journal of Popular Music Studies
Journal of Popular Music Studies (JPMS) is the peer-reviewed, quarterly publication of the U.S. Branch of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM-US).
Like its parent organization, JPMS views popular music as central to “notions of personal and collective identity, geographic identity, political affiliation,” and to our understandings of technological change, intellectual property, and the culture industries. The journal therefore features work on popular music in its historical, cultural, aesthetic, economic, and political registers. It is also concerned with such issues as popular music’s intersections with other arts, its relationships with old and new media, and the status of popular music studies as a field of teaching, research, and critical writing.
The journal’s purview encompasses all genres of music that have been dubbed popular in any geographic region. In addition to mainstream genres such as rock, hip hop, EDM, punk, or country, it explores popular forms ranging from broadsides to Broadway to Bollywood film music. It aims to present popular music scholarship from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including history, sociology, musicology, ethnomusicology, cultural studies, and communication.
The journal strives to be a forum that places academic inquiry alongside the insights and expertise of critics, journalists, and those in the industry. In addition to research-based scholarly articles and book reviews, we feature contributions on pedagogy; critical assessments of recordings or performances that place them in a wider historical, musical, or cultural context; longform journalistic essays; and roundtable discussions, conference keynote presentations and reports, and methodological and literature reviews that reflect the history or current state of the field. We also regularly publish special issues coordinated by a guest editor or editors on important and emergent themes in popular music studies.
The Journal of Popular Music Studies also features a lively front-of-book section titled Field Notes. This section features non-peer-reviewed pieces of 1,500–7,500 words. Field Notes pieces include not just single-author essays and reviews but also more conversational and dynamic formats, such as virtual and transcribed discussions, conference reports, interviews, and multi-author forums. Because Field Notes pieces do not undergo peer review, we are often able to publish more swiftly than the more conventional academic publishing allows; thus we’re particularly enthusiastic about publishing pieces that take up topics of timely interest to the field of popular music studies or closely related areas of research. We are also keen to publish pieces that reflect conversations about popular music and sound studies taking place in non-academic or para-academic settings, in addition to scholarly conversations.
A note about back issues: University of California Press began publishing JPMS in 2015. Volumes published prior to 2015 are available through Wiley.