Professor Alejandro L. Madrid receives Latin American Studies Association Award

Professor Alejandro L. Madrid has received the 2026 "Archives" Section Award for Best Publication by the Latin American Studies Association for his article "Listening through the Colonial Noise: Things, Sound Objects, and Legacy at the Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv’s Konrad T. Preuss Collection," which was published in the Journal of the American Musicological Society. The award is given to an exceptional publication about archives, libraries and digital scholarship published in 2025. Professor Madrid's article was praised as a rigorous study about colonial sound archives that contributes significantly to current debates about decolonization, restitution, and memory. 

The Latin American Studies Association (LASA) is the largest professional association in the world for individuals and institutions engaged in the study of Latin America. With over 13,000 members, over 60% of whom reside outside the United States, LASA is the one association that brings together experts on Latin America from all disciplines and diverse occupational endeavors, across the globe.

LASA's mission is to foster intellectual discussion, research, and teaching on Latin America, the Caribbean, and its people throughout the Americas, promote the interests of its diverse membership, and encourage civic engagement through network building and public debate.

Alejandro L. Madrid is the Walter W. Naumburg Professor of Music at Harvard University. He is a cultural theorist of sound and music working in Latin American and Latinx studies. His nine books and a host of distinguished articles have established him as one of the foremost musicologists of his generation and one of the leading scholars in Ibero-American music studies. He has received the Humboldt Research Award (Humboldt-Preis), a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Dent Medal, given by the International Musicological Society and the Royal Musical Association for “outstanding contributions to musicology,” top awards from the American Musicological Society (AMS), the Latin American Studies Association (LASA), the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM), the ASCAP Foundation, the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM) as well as Cuba’s Premio de Musicología Casa de las Américas, and Chile’s Premio de Musicología Samuel Claro Valdés. His work, which engages popular, folk, and art musics from multi-methodological perspectives, has been described as a “model for future works that aim to cross boundaries between musicology and ethnomusicology” and as “scholarship that intervenes in a number of important critical conversations.”

His research has been funded by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Fulbright Program, and the Ford Foundation, among others. He is currently writing a book about sound archives and the production and circulation of knowledge at the aural turn entitled The Archive and the Aural City: Sound, Knowledge, and the Politics of Listening; and a book about Silvio Rodríguez’s influential Nueva Trova album Días y flores. He is also working, in collaboration with the Momenta Quartet, on a 5-CD recording project of the complete works for string quartet by Mexican microtonal maverick Julián Carrillo for the Naxos label.

Professor Madrid serves as editor of Oxford University Press’s Currents in Latin American and Iberian Music series. He is frequently invited as an expert commentator to national and international media outlets and recently acted as music advisor to acclaimed filmmaker Peter Greenaway, whose film, Eisenstein in Guanajuato (2015), is set in early 1930s Mexico.