Beverley Diamond
Professor Emerita
Ethnomusicology
B. Mus. Honours (Toronto)
M.A. (Toronto)
Ph.D. (Toronto)
Dr. Diamond is a Canadian ethnomusicologist who assumed the Canada Research Chair in Traditional Music at Memorial University in 2002. Before arriving in St. John’s she held full-time teaching positions at McGill, Queen's, and York Universities, as well as visiting professorships at the University of Toronto and Harvard University. At Memorial University, she established the Research Centre for Music, Media and Place (MMaP) to serve as a liaison between university and communities on research projects of mutual interest. MMaP publishes in a variety of print and audio-visual media, including an archival CD series “Back on Track.”
Since the early 1970s, she has worked extensively in Inuit and First Nations communities in the Northwest Territories, Labrador, Quebec, and Ontario. Since 1999, she has done research in Sami communities in Norway and Finland. Her work has explored the relationship of music to issues of cultural identity (relating to such diverse subjects as women’s expressive cultures, musical instruments as cultural metaphor, and indigenous popular music), indigenous modernity issues (cultural property, technological change) and the role of the arts in reconciliation. Her publications include the books Native American Music in Eastern North America (2008, commissioned by Oxford University Press for their Global Music series, and Visions of Sound: Musical Instruments of First Nations Communities in Northeastern America (co-authored with M. Sam Cronk and F. von Rosen; University of Chicago Press, 1994), as well as several co-edited anthologies: Post-Colonial Distances. Popular Music in Canada and Australia (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007); Aboriginal Music in Contemporary Canada. Echoes and Exchanges (McGill-Queen’s.University Press, 2012) She also works on issues of historiography, particularly as they relate to Canadian cultural diversity, co-editing Canadian Music: Issues of Hegemony and Identity, (Canadian Scholars Press, 1994) and serving as editorial advisor for Canada for the Garland Encyclopedia of World Music. With Finnish ethnomusicologist, Dr. Pirkko Moisala, she co-edited Music and Gender (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000). Dr. Diamond’s most recent SSHRC-funded research has concerned the transnational circulation of indigenous music, cultural property, and the social construction of meaning in relation to changing technologies. During her 2012-13 Leave, she is finishing a book on the social history of audio recording in Newfoundland and Labrador.
Dr. Beverley Diamond was named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada(RSC), considered to be the highest academic honour in Canada. The society calls Dr. Diamond "a guiding voice in contemporary ethonomusicology in Canada" and "an inspiring mentor to more than 70 M.A. and Ph.D. students," and credits her for developing cross-cultural perspectives on gendered musical practices. She received a Trudeau Fellowship (2009-12) and was the first recipient of the SOCAN Foundation/CUMS Award of Excellence for the Advancement of Research in Canadian Music. A Festschrift was published in her honour in 2010.