Postdoctoral fellow Alyssa Cottle wins Cambridge University Press Award
Congratulations to Alyssa Cottle, current postdoctoral fellow in musicology at Western University, who won the 2026 Society for American Music’s Cambridge University Press Award. The Award was presented on March 14 during the 52nd Annual Conference of the Society for American Music, held in Richmond, Virginia.
The commendation of her paper that was written by the award committee was read aloud during the ceremony:
"The winner of the 2026 Cambridge University Press Award for international scholars is Alyssa Cottle, for her paper, "Commemoration, Memory, and the Chilean Post-Dictatorial Digital Sound Archive" presented at the 2026 National Meeting. The paper examines Chile's Popular Unity period (1970-1973) through the digital sound archive El Disco es Cultura, which preserves and commemorates the catalogue of the state-owned IRT Records, dispersed and fragmented after the 1973 CIA-backed coup that ended Salvador Allende’s socialist government and installed the dictator Augusto Pinochet. Cottle shows in her thought-provoking and eloquent paper how the project, which presents surviving recordings on online radio, excavates a cultural memory of past hopes and lost futures nearly erased amid ongoing political challenges in Chile during and after Pinochet’s dictatorship."
Cottle received her PhD from Harvard University. Her project at Western, "Music, Memory, Gender, and the Cold War in Latin America,” explores music and political change in Chile. She works with musicology faculty member Emily Abrams Ansari, with whom she is also collaborating to explore relationships between music and crafting. Interestingly, Ansari is also a past recipient of the prestigious Cambridge University Press Award and received the 2015 award for her paper "The Virtue of American Power and the Power of American Virtue: Exceptionalist Tropes in Early Cold War Musical Nationalism."
Photo: Denise Von Glahn, President of the Society for American Music and Professor of Musicology at Florida State University (left) presenting Postdoctoral Fellow Alyssa Cottle (right) with her award. (Credit: Michael Broyles/Society for American Music)
