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Conference Agenda

The Online Program of events for the 2026 AMS Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early November.

Use the "Filter by Track or Type of Session" or "Filter by Session Topic" dropdown to limit results by type. Some of the sessions are also color-coded: purple indicates performances, grey indicates paper forums, and orange indicates sessions which have been organized by one of the regional associations of IMS (ARLAC or IMSEA). (Sessions which are both IMS sessions and performances are only colored orange.)

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Click on the session name for a detailed view (with participant names and abstracts).

Daily Overview

Session

International Conversations about Music, Sound, and Trauma

Time:

Saturday, 14/Nov/2026:

10:00am - 11:30am

Session Topics:

1900–Present, Global / Transnational Studies, Sound Studies

Presentations

International Conversations about Music, Sound, and Trauma

Chair(s): Erin Brooks (State University of New York)

Presenter(s): Jillian Rogers (University of Florida); Michelle Meinhart (Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance); Marie Louise Herzfeld-Schild (University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna); Annelies Andries (Utrecht University)

Organized by the AMS Music, Sound, and Trauma Study Group.

In their summary of the history of trauma studies, Lucy Bond and Stef Craps note “the tendency to regard trauma as a transcultural, transnational, or global phenomenon is one of the most pronounced trends in trauma scholarship of the last decade” (2020, 104). Whereas earlier inquiries often emphasized European or American cultural traumas of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, contemporary work on trauma emerges everywhere, often with implicit postcolonial critiques of overly-universalist applications of trauma theory. As scholars of music and sound across the globe increasingly engage with—or live amidst—trauma, how do the different strands, understandings, and concerns about trauma studies shape these encounters? From differing understandings of cultural or collective traumas (Eyerman, Alexander, Neal) to the hegemony of certain trauma theories or theorists, what productive conversations and critiques can help this emerging scholarly subdiscipline avoid overly-narrow conceptions of trauma? These questions beckon us to consider not only the histories and current role of music and trauma studies, but also the singularities of trauma studies across the world.

Assisted by the online format of the 2026 AMS meeting, this year’s study group event features a roundtable exploration of these questions in partnership with a group of international scholars who work on music, sound, and trauma. This new association coalesced around 2022 via online events and study days, and has applied for recognition as a study group through the International Musicological Society. While individual scholars often attend both the AMS Study Group and online events held by this new international organization, this year’s AMS meeting would be the first opportunity for direct collaboration and dialogue between the two groups. With a focus on emerging global trends in studying music and trauma, we hope to make this collaborative venture the first of many cooperative encounters between these two groups. The roundtable will begin with comments by leaders of the AMS and proposed IMS study groups, followed by responses, questions, and discussion from additional panelists and attendees.