We just received official word from Duke University Press that “Metal Rules the Globe is now in production as one of the first books on our Spring 2012 list.” This is a later publication date than we would have liked, but issues with artwork and permissions delayed the transmittal of the manuscript to production. However, the result of this process was positive: after some intense negotiations, the book will now have the longest quotes from songtexts and the highest number of images possible.
In other breaking news, earlier this month MRTG co-editor Harris M. Berger was elected President of the U.S.-based Society for Ethnomusicology. Not too shabby for a metal scholar! And that’s not the only compelling bit of evidence that heavy metal scholarship is making significant inroads into traditional academia. This month also saw the third annual Metal, Music, and Politics conference in Prague (the first, which I attended in Salzburg in 2008, is widely regarded as the birth of the contemporary field of metal studies) with papers like Kirsten Sollee’s “Hysteric Desire: Sexual Positions, Sonic Subjectivity, and the Performance of Gender in Glam Metal†and Karl Spracklen’s “Playing with Madness in the Forest of Shadows: Dissonance, Deviance and Nonconformity in the Black Metal Scene†(http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/critical-issues/ethos/music-metal-politics/conference-programme-abstracts-and-papers/). The metal studies movement continues its exponential growth with metal-related papers and panels appearing at academic conferences around the world and several journal and scholarly book projects in the works. There’s also going to be a major international heavy metal studies conference in North America, in my home base of Bowling Green, USA in late spring 2012 (which will likely include some sort of book-launching event for MRTG). You heard it here first (probably)! Watch this space for more details as they become available.
All for now,
\m/
Jeremy
Leave a Reply