Congratulations to Adam Possener (UCL), who has been awarded this year’s Royal Musical Association Research Chronicle Student Paper Prize. The prize is awarded annually in collaboration with the BFE/RMA Research Students’ Conference, held each January.

Adam’s paper, ‘Kleztronica, Jewish Anti-Zionism and Postvernacularity’ explored how Yiddish language and music have been utilized by anti-Zionist activists to promote radical diasporism, expressing a diasporic Jewish identity in contrast to a Zionist ethnonationalist one. The work stood out for its careful theorisation and probing analysis of examples from the techno-klezmer genre, Kleztronica.

Special mention also goes to our two runners up: Tamara Batty (University of Birmingham), for her paper ‘Finding Tarab in 21st-century Arab Popular Music: A Close Analysis of “Fog Alghaim” by Hello Psychaleppo’, and Kate Adams (SOAS), ‘Ending the (sm)othering: Applying an Ethnomusicological Framework to a Non-Deficit-Based Examination of Musicking with Profound Intellectual and Multiple Disabilities (PIMD)’.

Thank you to all the entrants. The standard was incredibly high, and it was wonderful to catch a glimpse of all the student work underway across the country and beyond.