The RMA/Cambridge University Press Outstanding Monograph Book Prize for 2025 is awarded to Jessica Swanston Baker for Island Time: Speed and the Archipelago from St. Kitts and Nevis (University of Chicago Press). The book presents a detailed analysis of wylers, a popular musical style from the islands of St. Kitts and Nevis, in the context of the postcolonial Caribbean. The panel commended this monograph for its extensive fieldwork, the use of speed as an innovative conceptual basis and its foundation in the author’s family history research, all of which made the book an engaging read. The book makes a strongly original contribution to the study of music of the Caribbean.

The panel gives an honourable mention to Matthew D. Morrison (Stanford University) for Blacksound: Making Race and Popular Music in the United States (University of California Press, 2024). This ambitious book revisits the long history of popular music in the United States by exploring how it arose from slavery and blackface.