The Music and Song Section of the American Folklore Society sponsors the Bertrand H. Bronson Student Paper Prize, which is awarded to the best student project that combines research and analysis of some aspect of a music or song tradition.
Projects may be in the form of papers or finished audio or video presentations. Papers should be written using the same general guidelines as published journal articles in terms of format and length; papers over fifty double-spaced pages will not be considered. Audio or video media productions should be 25 to 60 minutes in length, and should be accompanied by appropriate annotation and analysis consisting of five to ten double-spaced pages. Although we are willing to consider a broad range of projects, we may give precedence to projects that show familiarity with the discipline of folklore and with folkloristic and other ethnographic approaches to music and song. Students should specify when and under what circumstances the submission was produced, and give the name and contact information of the faculty member who supervised the project.
The deadline for submissions is midnight on September 15. Submissions should be made electronically, either as an attachment to an email or as a link within an email; see the technical notes below for more details. The email should be sent to the section co-convener, Stephen Winick, at [email protected]. The subject line of the email should be “Bronson Prize Submission.”
Technical notes: the projects will be evaluated by a committee. Thus, papers are best submitted as electronic files, preferably Word documents, which can be emailed among committee members. Audio projects can be submitted as mp3 files or placed online where they can be downloaded or streamed from committee members’ home institutions. Video projects should ideally be placed online for downloading or streaming, since the size of video files makes them hard to distribute via email. You may use a commercial site such as YouTube, or a private personal site, for this purpose. In the case of media submissions placed online, please send an email cover letter as detailed above, with a link to the streaming or downloadable media file or the web page where it resides.