Creative Music Research in Special Collections: Creative Research Opportunities

"The Incubator Awards provide financial and research support for students using historical and rare library materials at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill towards projects in the arts. Students are encouraged to follow their curiosity and use archival and special collections items as source material and/or inspiration; projects do not need to rely exclusively on materials in our collections. Recipients will receive a small stipend, instruction in special collections research practices, and support from library staff as they conduct their artistic research. The Incubator Awards aim to foster engagement with UNC’s rich cultural and historical resources and encourage students to pursue new directions, topics, or methods in their work and creative process."

"The Visiting Researcher Fellowships provide short-term research fellowships to support intensive, innovative, and impactful research and artistic use of its collections. This fellowship was previously known as the Summer Visiting Research Fellowship."

"The American Folklife Center (AFC) at the Library of Congress is pleased to invite applications for Artists in Resonance Fellowships at the AFC to support artists in creating new musical works inspired by and sourced from collection materials in the American Folklife Center Archives."

"The 2024 Media Archives Fellowship is an outreach program of the Special Collections and Archives (SCA) department of Hutchins Library at Berea College. The program is designed to increase the scholarly use of SCA’s non-commercial audio and video collections."

"The Institute of Jazz Studies’ (IJS) Berger –Carter – Berger Research Fellowship provides awards of up to $1,000 for travel and accommodation in conjunction with research conducted at the IJS. The research funds are designed to foster, promote, and support research by scholars using IJS collections. To date, over 80 awards have been given to scholars and students worldwide working in a variety of disciplines that intersect at the Institute’s archival and library holdings."

"The Dena Epstein Award for Archival and Library Research in American Music was created through a generous endowment from Morton and Dena Epstein to the Music Library Association in 1995. Grants are awarded to support research in archives or libraries internationally on any aspect of American music. There are no restrictions as to an applicant's age, nationality, profession, or institutional affiliation. All proposals are reviewed entirely on the basis of merit. The decision by the Dena Epstein Award Committee and the Board of Directors of the Music Library Association is announced at the MLA annual meeting. Calls for applications are issued in the spring."

"The Nasir Jones Hiphop Fellowship is the first academic fellowship named after a hiphop artist. It is intended for both scholars and artists who demonstrate exceptional capacity for increased scholarship and exceptional creative ability in the arts in connection with hiphop. Fellows are challenged to develop work and art, to paraphrase Nas, that “speaks through American youth rather than speaks about and to them.”