Beverley Diamond
Canada Research Chair in Traditional Music, Ethnomusicology
B.Mus. Toronto
M.A. Toronto
Ph.D. Toronto
Office: Arts & Culture Centre
Phone: (709) 864-3701
E-mail: bdiamond@mun.ca
Web site: http://www.mun.ca/mmap/
Beverley Diamond (B.Mus, M.A. Ph.D. University of Toronto) 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.
Since the early 1970s, she has worked extensively in Inuit and First Nations communities in the Northwest Territories, Labrador, Quebec, and Ontario. Recently she has done research in Sami communities in Norway and Finland. 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) have been central to her work. Her publications include the book 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). She also works on issues of historiography, particularly as they relate to Canadian music studies, co-editing with Robert Witmer, 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. A recent research project, the Canadian Musical Pathways Project, involved oral history, and festival documentation in six culturally diverse communities. Together with Finnish ethnomusicologist, Dr. Pirkko Moisala, she co-edited Music and Gender (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000).
She currently holds a SSHRC Research Grant to study the ways in which indigenous musics (both Native American and Sami) are being selected, produced, and circulated for transnational audiences. Beverley Diamond is deeply involved with the development of the discipline of ethnomusicology currently serving on the Boards of both the Society for Ethnomusicology and the International Council for Traditional Music. She is passionately committed to ensuring that ethnomusicology -- in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, and abroad -- remains an exciting and socially relevant field of study.
