News

Prof. Julie Cumming honoured for graduate teaching excellence

Published: 13 April 2017

Professor Julie Cumming, Associate Professor of Music History and Musicology, Interim Dean of the Schulich School of Music, has received the Graduate Faculty Teaching Award (Doctoral-level) 2016-2017  from the Northeastern Association of Graduate Schools (NAGS). The association is comprised of Deans and Associate Deans of graduate studies from universities on the east coast of the US north of Washington DC, within Canada, from  universities in Ontario, Quebec, and the Maritimes.  Membership in NAGS provides a community of Deans and Associate Deans  with a creative forum to address common issues within member institutions relating to graduate study and research. 

Professor Cumming's Graduate Faculty Teaching Award (Doctoral-level) 2016-2017 award recognizes her excellence and creativity in the teaching of graduate students with an emphasis on pedagogy, including classroom-based and/or distance learning instruction. It also considers innovation in graduate curriculum development and implementation.  One example of this is the Cumming-Schubert Research Lab, which she and Professor Peter Schubert established.  The lab is a forum in which supervised or co-supervised graduate students from a wide variety of disciplines ranging from musicology and music theory to English, Art History, Music Technology and Music Performance Masters meet weekly to share challenges and successes.  This interdisciplinary group works diligently on writing and presentation skills and they edit a wide variety of materials as well as critique content and presentation styles for upcoming paper presentations.  In addition the group serves as a sample class for job interviews, and helps beginning students learn about the professional academic path ahead.  The Cumming-Schubert Research Lab parallels the experience that graduate students in the sciences have when they are part of a lab community.   

A devoted and well-loved pedagogue and mentor, Professor Cumming has previously been the recipient of the Schulich School of Music Full-Time Teaching Award (2007) as well as McGill’s David Thomson Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching and Supervision (2015).  She has supervised PhD dissertations on wind players in Spain c. 1600, early eighteenth-century English theatre music, espionage in Elizabethan England, parody masses, accidentals in fifteenth-century music, sine nomine masses in the fifteenth century, music and the plague in the Renaissance, Attaingnant’s motet prints, Venetian language polyphony, music about music in the Renaissance, the early musical revival, and Renaissance counterpoint treatises. She has supervised MA theses on Hildegard von Bingen, fifteenth-century chansons, Heinrich Biber, Handel's borrowing, madrigal and lute song, Salve regina settings by Galuppi, repetition in the music of Compère, motets on texts from the Song of Songs, Marian motets and confraternities in the early sixteenth century, Ariosto settings from sixteenth-century Verona, and improvised polyphony in Colonial Mexico. "We are tremendously proud of Prof. Cumming and indebted to her this past year for continuing to carry the mission of the faculty forward as our Interim Dean with such distinction," said Prof. Eleanor Stubley, Associate Dean, Graduate Studies.

Her former students and postdocs teach at University of Toronto, University of Aberdeen, Carleton University (Ottawa), Loyola College (Baltimore), University of Utah, and Brandeis University. 

Professor Cumming was nominated for this award by Josephine Nalbantoglu, McGill's Dean of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies, and received a certificate and cash prize of $1000 at an event held in New York City on Friday, April 7, 2017.  

 

 

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