Welcome to The International Association for the Study of Popular Music UK and Ireland Branch

Andrew Goodwin Memorial Prize

Andrew Goodwin was a key figure in the development of popular music studies. His background was in media and cultural studies: he received his Ph.D. in Cultural Studies from the University of Birmingham and taught for many years in the Department of Media Studies at the University of San Francisco. He was a pioneer of the scholarly analysis of music video (in his book, Dancing in the Distraction Factory: Music Television and Popular Culture, for example, which drew on his previous work on television) and an astute critic of the use of postmodern theory in popular cultural studies. But his work also reflected his experiences as a working musician and critic (experiences explored in his entertaining Professor of Pop blog), and his articles on such topics as music technology and the concept of world music remain models of clear-eyed common sense and analytic insight, informed as much by practice as theory. As a teacher, colleague and friend, Andrew was an untiring source of ideas, enthusiasm and support, and his untimely death, in September 2013, was a huge loss to all of us in IASPM. The Andrew Goodwin Memorial Prize was established in 2014 as a fitting tribute to his generosity to younger scholars.

Aim: To promote popular music research and to support new scholars.

Eligibility: Postgraduate students who are currently registered at universities and colleges in the U.K. and Ireland and who are members of IASPM. Current students and IASPM UK-I members who submitted essays for the AGMP in previous years but were unsuccessful may apply again; however, they are not allowed to submit the same essay (or essay topic) twice. Previous winners of the AGMP may not apply again.

Awarded for: Essay of 3,000 words, on any aspect of popular music from any disciplinary perspective. We are now also accepting submissions of ‘video essays’ between 10 and 15 minutes long.

Dates: Submissions to open 5th June 2026 and close 3rd August 2026.

Prize: The judging panel as appointed by Trustees will award a first prize of £1,000, with the runner-up receiving £500. Both the winner and runner-up essays will be published on the Andrew Goodwin Memorial Prize web page on the IASPM UK and Ireland website.

Guidelines for submission:

Written submissions should be in either a Microsoft Word (.doc or .docx) or .RTF document file format, with double-spaced, 11-point in Arial font text (quotations larger than 40 words indented, in 10-point text).

The student’s name and institution should appear on a title page as part of the essay document. PDF files cannot be accepted.

All written submissions should follow the Harvard Referencing Guide.

Video submissions should be uploaded to Vimeo, YouTube (or other stable video sharing website) with an ‘unlisted’ setting prior to the judging. (This can be amended to ‘public’ after the award has been made). The videos themselves can use whichever form of referencing is apt – e.g. spoken references, written text visible on a slide or similar – but you must provide a full bibliography/discography/filmography (Harvard format) alongside the video submission. Please submit in the form of Word or RTF document with:

Student’s name and institutional affiliation
Title
‘Unlisted’ link to the video
Full reference list

ALL submissions (written or video) should be pieces of work that have not been previously published.

The judging panel require original authorship and responsibility for the contents of the submission. Use of GenAI must be owned, declared and justified within the word limit. The declaration should briefly state the tool(s) used and how the output informed (but did not write) the final work. You must ensure that all sources are properly evidenced and referenced in accordance with the Harvard Referencing Guide.

The judges reserve the right to request further information about the use of AI tools and may disqualify submissions where AI use is judged to have undermined the originality, authorship, or scholarly integrity of the work.

Submissions to be received by end of day Monday 3 August 2026 to the following e-mail address: [email protected].