Margaret Walker

Dr. Margaret E. Walker is a graduate of the University of Toronto (Musicology/Ethnomusicology) and the Royal Conservatory of Music Professional School (Piano Performance and Pedagogy) and she joined the School of Music at Queen’s in 2006. Her teaching and research cross disciplinary boundaries, and include ethnomusicology, historical musicology, historiography, music teaching and learning, and dance studies.

Margaret began her teaching career as a studio piano teacher in 1984 and taught at the Royal Conservatory of Music between 1989 and 2000. She currently teaches courses at the Dan School of Drama and Music in music history and culture, and is cross appointed to the graduate program in Cultural Studies. She won the School of Music Excellence in Teaching Award in 2015, and has mentored undergraduate students in Directed Study, BA Thesis, and USSRF research projects and graduate students in the Arts Leadership and Cultural Studies programs. In 2016, she initiated revisions to the music history and culture core courses and continues to lead curriculum development in that area.

Until recently, Margaret’s research focused solely on the North Indian classical dance called kathak. Her monograph, India’s Kathak Dance in Historical Perspective (SOAS Series in Musicology, Ashgate, 2014), critically deconstructs the nationalist received history and has become a foundational source in South Asian ethnomusicology and dance history. As a South-Asianist, she has also co-edited a special theme journal issue: Vol. 44.1 of MUSICultures with Dr Kaley Mason on “Generational Frictions in Musical Ethnography of South Asia” (2017), published work on dance, gender, and history in edited volumes and peer-reviewed journals, and is currently co-editing a volume of essays on North Indian music histories with Dr Katherine Schofield. Between 2011 and 2015, Dr Walker was a member of the ERC-funded “Musical Transitions to European Colonialism in the Eastern Indian Ocean” research team and in winter 2016 she participated in a Visitorship to King’s College University of London as part of the Balzan Research in Musicology Project “Towards a Global History of Music.”

In 2018, Margaret’s research took an anticolonial turn, focusing on curriculum and pedagogical choices in higher education. Her article “Towards a Decolonized Music History Curriculum” was published in the Journal of Music History Pedagogy where it has been read more than 5000 times. She has since then co-edited Vol 39.1 of Intersections with Dr Robin Attas in a special theme edition on “Decolonizing Music Pedagogies” led a SSHRC-funded team project entitled “Changing Colonial Narratives in Eurocentric Music History,” and published an article on antiracist pedagogy and university music history in MUSICultures Vol 50.1.

Margaret Walker served as the Director of the School of Music between 2010 and 2015 and was a key facilitator in the creation of the new School of Drama and Music. She is currently serving a two-year term as President of the Canadian University Music Society/ /Société de musique des universités canadiennes, continuing to lead and facilitate change in higher education music study.