In June of this year, IU announced the creation of a new Racial Justice Research Fund designed to provide start-up funding for race-related research, workshops, and to engage members of the university community. As of September 21, the fund was supporting 31 projects and continues to accept proposals on a rolling basis.
Ayana Smith, associate professor of musicology at the Jacobs School of Music, has been named a recipient of this award for her project, titled: Creating Real Change – The Pedagogy of Race and Representation in Music History.
Creating Real Change: The Pedagogy of Race and Representation in Music History, establishes a collaborative, research-based, laboratory model to assist faculty and student instructors striving to reform the music history curriculum at Indiana University and beyond. The project addresses the racial imbalances encoded into the canonic repertory, pedagogy, and historiography of our field. The project will develop tools that instructors can use at all stages of course design, from syllabus writing to lecture planning, discussion techniques, and assignments. Over a four-year period, the “Creating Real Change” team will develop and design curricular modules; host collaborative workshops and discussions; publish scholarship; and disseminate methodological tools and trainings. The current team includes: Devon Nelson, PhD; Miguel Arango Calle, and Deanna Pellerano.
Professor Smith specializes in Baroque music; opera, aesthetics, and visual culture (1650–1750); race and representation in music history pedagogy; women and gender in music. She is a recipient of grants from the National Endowment of the Humanities, Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, Social Science Research Council, and Mellon Foundation. She completed her doctoral education at Yale University under the direction of Ellen Rosand.
About the Racial Justice Research Fund
Jointly supported by the IU Vice President for Research and the Vice President for Diversity, Equity, and Multicultural Affairs, the fund is available to IU faculty on all campuses without regard for field or discipline in an effort to address critical racial equity and justice issues as broadly as possible. Funded projects are taking place on six IU campuses and at the IU School of Medicine, covering wide-ranging topics such as environmental racism, Black women and faith, race as a factor in patient-oriented research, police misconduct, anti-Asian bias, and educational interventions.
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