In 2016, James Grier, Professor of Music History, was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.  This honour recognized his achievement in research on medieval music and liturgy, particularly that of Aquitaine, textual criticism and editing music, and popular music since World War II. His books include The Critical Editing of Music (Cambridge University Press, 1996), which has been translated into Spanish (Ediciones Akal, 2008); a critical study of the musical activities of Adémar de Chabannes, The Musical World of a Medieval Monk:  Adémar de Chabannes in Eleventh-Century Aquitaine (Cambridge University Press, 2006); an edition of Adémar’s music in Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis (Brepols, 2012); and a detailed palaeographic study of the music hand of Adémar de Chabannes (989-1034) in Corpus Christianorum, Autographa Medii Aevi.  These last two are the first volumes to investigate music in their respective distinguished series, and both won the Margaret Wade Labarge Prize from the Canadian Society of Medievalists in 2014 and 2019, respectively. More recently, he has published a critical edition of the Office of the Holy Trinity, as practised at Saint Martial in the eleventh century, in De Musicae Cultu (Brepols, 2020), and a detailed historical account of Musical Notation in the West (Cambridge University Press, 2021). Translations of The Critical Editing of Music into Japanese and of Musical Notation in the West into Arabic are forthcoming. Professor Grier has published four articles in the Journal of the American Musicological Society; his articles also appear in Journal of Musicology, Early Music History, Acta Musicologica, Plainsong and Medieval Music, Musica Disciplina, Revue d’Histoire des Textes, Speculum, Scriptorium and Journal of Medieval Latin, as well as in many collections of essays and Festschriften. He is presently completing critical editions of the Offertory and Tract from Aquitanian witnesses of the eleventh century (forthcoming from Brepols). His work has been featured in interviews on radio and television and he has appeared as keynote speaker all over the world.

Before arriving at Western in 1997, Professor Grier taught for seven years at Yale University where he won a Morse Fellowship (1993-94).  He also taught Classics at University of Waterloo and Mount Allison University, and was a member of the School of Music (cross-appointed to the Department of Classics), Queen’s University. In 2002-3, he held the Edward T. Cone Membership in Music Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. His research has been supported by seven grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and a Killam Research Fellowship (2009-12). He has also held Fellowships from the National Endowment of the Humanities (2009-10), the American Council of Learned Societies (2009), and most recently the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2020-21) for his research in the foundations of musical literacy in the medieval West.