Welcome to the BFE/RMA Research Students’ 2025 Conference!
Overview
The British Forum for Ethnomusicology (BFE) and Royal Musical Association (RMA) Research Students’ Conference is hosted by the University of Aberdeen School of Language, Literature, Music, and Visual Culture on 9–11 January 2025
This conference is a fantastic opportunity for students to gain experience in presenting their work in a friendly and welcoming environment. A wide variety of events will be held including masterclasses, concerts, workshops, panels, training sessions, and extracurricular activities in the wonderful setting of old Aberdeen.
This year’s conference will be in-person with limited hybrid events.
Student Paper Prize
The Royal Music Association Research Chronicle (RMARC) invites you to enter our student-paper prize, organised in collaboration with the 2025 BFE/RMA Research Students’ Conference. Participation is open to all speakers (in-person or online) at the 2025 BFE/RMA Research Students’ Conference hosted by the University of Aberdeen. Papers should fall under the remit of RMARC – i.e. to publish submissions from all areas of music research that make extensive use of primary sources widely conceived, such as recordings, digital-borne files, results of ethnographic work, and/or archival materials.
How to enter
To enter, please submit your paper to the RMARC editor Tamsin Alexander (t.alexander@gold.ac.uk) by 28 February 2025. The written submission should closely match the paper delivered at the conference – i.e. it should not be significantly amended or expanded. You may add in-text references or footnotes and a bibliography if you wish, but you are not expected in this initial submission to adapt the text for publication as a journal article.
The script must be submitted as an .odt, .doc or .docx file. The text should be double spaced and in a commonly used font (e.g. Times New Roman, Arial), size 11 or 12. Figures, musical examples and links are permitted as long as they are essential to the comprehension of the paper. You may use any referencing style of your choice. Please do not submit PowerPoint files or similar.
Prizes
The entries will be judged by the editing team of the RMARC, and the winner will be announced in April 2025. The winner will receive a £100 book token from Cambridge University Press as well as mentorship from the RMARC to develop and expand their submission for publication. The submission will then be published in the RMARC, subject to satisfactory peer-review, as per the journal’s usual procedures.
Please feel free to contact the editor t.alexander@gold.ac.uk for any questions.
Call for proposals
Proposals were welcome from postgraduate research students (PhD, MPhil, MRes) in any area of Music, including musicology, ethnomusicology, popular music, music psychology, composition, audiovisual media, performance, and/or other creative practices, and research that cuts across disciplinary boundaries. For Poster Presentations, proposals were invited from students enrolled in postgraduate taught programmes (e.g. MA, MMus)