Professors Kippen and Sanger’s Continued Commitment to Ethnomusicology

Congratulations to ethnomusicology doctoral students Julia Monaco and Chris Hull, who are the 2026 recipients of the Sanger-Kippen Ethnomusicology Award for Fieldwork. Each of them will receive an award to support their dissertation research. Julia will be traveling to Pasto, Nariño, Colombia, where she is studying musica campesina Nariñense, a type of Colombian “country” music from the rural southwest of the country. Her project explores how musica campesina participants negotiate and maintain local musical and social values, and, ultimately, their place within the Colombian nation-state despite dominant notions of Colombian national culture and identity from which they are largely excluded. Chris’s project takes him to Bali, Indonesia, where he is examining the impact of global economic forces on Balinese music, musicians, and society. His project involves several facets including the revitalization and commercialization of a once nearly forgotten type of gamelan as well as an analysis of how and to what effect gamelan musicians expand their musical involvement in relation to opportunities and demands of Indonesia’s tourism industry, a vital link between Indonesia and world-spanning economic systems. 

The Sanger-Kippen Ethnomusicology Award for Fieldwork was renewed in fall 2025, thanks to a generous donation from retired U of T ethnomusicology professors Annette Sanger and James Kippen. The award was first created in 2017 and has supported research on music and sound practices undertaken by U of T Ethnomusicology doctoral students in diverse locations worldwide. Among past recipients are current doctoral candidates Upatyaka Dutta (India); Andrew Janzen (Brazil); Hamidreza Salehyar (Iran); as well as PhD graduates Nil Basdurak (Turkey); Allison Sokil (US and Canada); Hadi Milanloo (Iran); Jack Harris (Great Britain); and Nadia Younan (US and Canada). 

The impetus for the award, which now provides up to $5000 annually, was the increasing difficulty and resultant decreasing frequency with which our students had been pursuing projects based on extended and immersive experiences with music cultures in contexts that were not in or close to Toronto. This type of research has long been a cornerstone of ethnomusicology, a discipline devoted to trying to understand music and sound in and as culture, regardless of place or time. Yet, as Professor Kippen, a noted scholar of Hindustani music who spent years conducting research in Lucknow, India, and Professor Sanger, who became an expert in Balinese gamelan by studying with master musicians in Indonesia, noticed, U of T ethnomusicology students were very often basing their dissertations on fieldwork conducted in and around Toronto. Such fieldwork “at home” has become rather common among ethnomusicologists in recent years, and Toronto is certainly an appealing site for ethnographic research. In fact, scholars frequently come from afar to do fieldwork here. Yet several of our students turned to Toronto-based projects even if they had at one point or another expressed interest in researching a more distantly located music or sound culture. And even those who did do fieldwork in more distant locales were often able to do so only through multiple short trips when and if time and especially finances allowed. 

Thanks to Professors Sanger and Kippen’s generosity in creating and maintaining this award, U of T ethnomusicologists will be better able to realize their research goals in a wider array of settings. Based on the examples of past winners, we expect to see innovative, exciting, and influential scholarship emerging from this fieldwork.

To learn more about how to establish a scholarship or support a program, please contact Rachel Loo, Development Officer, at rachel.loo@utoronto.ca or 416-946-3464.