Irish Musical Studies publishes monographs and edited volumes reflecting the plurality and presence of Irish music across history and in the present moment. Building on twelve previously published titles by Irish Academic Press/Four Courts Press, the ‘new’ Irish Musical Studies series seeks to understand Irish musical practice not only as an expression of Irish, British and North American cultural history, but as an art form whose identity and meaning have been shaped, determined and sometimes silenced by political, religious and social forces from the middle ages to the early twenty-first century.
The series also seeks to enlist biographical, cultural and gender studies, in addition to studies in popular culture, ethnology and film studies in order to deepen the scholarly reception of music as a primary signature and preoccupation of Irish identity in a host of historical and global contexts. Although volumes in the series will clearly be addressed to a wide academic constituency of music history and musicology, the series will also publish monographs and collections which speak to a more general readership in Irish studies. Books in the series will embrace art, popular and traditional/folk music.