CRI, LACC, and FIU Libraries Award Travel Grants to Scholars of Cuban Music

The Cuban Research Institute, the Latin American and Caribbean Center, and the Libraries at Florida International University are pleased to announce the winners of the 2012 Travel Grant Competition to scholars of Cuban music. The following scholars will receive funding to travel to Florida International University in Miami to conduct research in the Díaz-Ayala Cuban and Latin American Popular Music Collection, housed in the Green Library:

• Michael Eckroth, New York University
Project: "The Popular Cuban Piano Style of the 1940s and 1950s"

• Sarah Town, Princeton University
Project: "Mambomania: The Explosion of Cuban Popular Dance Styles in the 1940s and 1950s"

Grant recipients will spend several days studying the collection as part of their research on Cuban music. This is the seventh round of winners of the Travel Grants to Scholars of Cuban Music, an initiative of the Cuban Research Institute, the Latin American and Caribbean Center, and the Libraries to increase access and usage of this important historical resource.

The Díaz-Ayala Cuban and Latin American Popular Music Collection is the most extensive publicly available collection of Cuban music in the United States. The collection’s approximately 100,000 items span the history of popular Cuban and other Latin music, including 25,000 LPs and 14,500 78 mms. The collection also includes 4,500 cassettes containing interviews with composers and musicians, radio programs, music, and other materials; 4,000 pieces of sheet music; 3,000 books; and thousands of CDs, photographs, videocassettes, and paper files. Among the collection’s rarest items are recordings made in prerevolutionary Cuba.

For additional information, call 305.348.1991 or write cri@fiu.edu.