The AIA «Telestes» Award for Material Culture Research in Ancient Music and Dance Grant

The AIA «Telestes» Award promotes research in ancient music and dance by recognizing scholars who utilize material culture evidence. This award aims to bridge the gap between traditional archaeomusicology and contemporary archaeological perspectives. Open to recent Ph.D. graduates, it encourages cross-disciplinary approaches. The recipient will receive a €1,500 book voucher from Fabrizio Serra Editore and an annual subscription to Telestes, fostering further exploration in this vital field. The award will be presented at the 2023 AIA Annual Meeting.

Purpose of the Award
Although over the last decade, various scholarly disciplines have increasingly devoted attention to ancient music and dance, they have done so by focusing on textual sources. However, in reconstructing features of ancient music and dance performances, the evidence offered by material culture within its archaeological context, although overlooked in previous studies, should play a critical role.
Aiming to encourage this approach, the AIA and «Telestes» Award will be awarded to scholars that explore material evidence of music and dance, and highlight how this evidence contributes to a deeper understanding of the cultural and social meanings and functions of music and dance within activities of ritual and everyday life. The winning scholar will show a commitment to reconstructing the many different ways and contexts in which music and dance were experienced.
Moreover, the AIA and «Telestes» Award present an important opportunity to fill the gap between existing treatments of the sub-discipline of ‘archaeomusicology’, or ‘music archaeology’– rooted quite self-consciously in the methods of ancient music and dance scholars – and the possibilities offered by the rather different perspectives that have recently emerged within archaeology, art history, archaeology of performance, soundscape archaeology, sensory studies, auditory archaeology, aural architecture, and digital heritage.
Award Prize
The recipient of the award will be presented with a book voucher worth €1,500 (ca. $1,700 USD) provided by Fabrizio Serra Editore (http://www.libraweb.net/marchi.php?chiave=6), the pre-eminent Italian publisher of world-renowned academic journals and an independent, international, and authoritative press of scholarly works specializing in the Humanities and Social Sciences. The award will also include an annual subscription to Telestes. An International Journal of Archaeomusicology and Archaeology of Sound. The award will be presented during the 2023 AIA Annual Meeting.

Eligibility

The award is open to anyone who has defended a Ph.D. thesis no more than two calendar years prior to the nomination deadline. Research is welcomed in the broadly defined Mediterranean region and from other areas of the world. Cross-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary approaches would be particularly appreciated.