Early Recordings Association (ERA) Conference 2025 - call for papers

The Early Recordings Association (ERA) is a non-profit association and an international platform for communication between researchers and early recording enthusiasts. ERA is a free source and online platform for general audiences, academic researchers, collectors, and enthusiasts interested in early recordings, currently connecting over 200 members all over the world. ERA events open pathways for researchers, practitioners and enthusiasts to collaborate, and share their knowledge, experience and skills.
 

Call for papers

The programme committee welcomes proposals from early-career researchers, postgraduate students and established experts who currently work on early recordings in the widest range of genres and perspectives. 

We welcome proposals for:

• Individual papers (20 minutes, plus 10-minutes for questions)
• Lecture-recitals (35 minutes, plus 10 minutes for questions) 
• Panel discussions (1 hour and 30 minutes in total). 

Researchers, enthusiasts, collectors, performers, early career researchers, and PhD students are warmly invited to share their research on a range of topics including, but not limited to: 

• Early recording technologies and recording practices
• Early recordings as documents of historical performance practices
• Wider cultural significance of early recordings
• Discographies and record archiving
• Database creation for discographic data and audio files
• Early recording collections and collecting practices
• Folk-popular musics and historical recordings
• Historical records and musical analysis

Submission details

Abstracts (maximum 300 words) and short biographies (120 words) should be sent to earlyrecordingsassociation@surrey.ac.uk, including the applicant’s institutional affiliation and contact details. 

Deadline for submissions

Deadline for submissions: 3 February 2025.

Decisions

Decisions will be communicated by 14 March.

The programme committee will communicate its decision by 1 March 2025, and the full programme will be announced by 1 April 2025.

Programme committee

• Inja Stanovic (University of Surrey)
• Eva Moreda Rodriguez (University of Glasgow)
• Patrick Feaster (First Sounds Initiative)
• Nikos Ordoulidis (University of Ioannina)
• Filip Sir (National Museum Prague).