Trax on the Trail is a website devoted to the musical landscape of presidential campaigns. After our successful documentation and analysis of the 2016 campaign, we are excited to announce our preparations for the 2020 election cycle.

We welcome several new members to our team. Naomi Graber, an assistant professor of musicology at the Hugh Hodgson School of Music at the University of Georgia will join the team as the website’s co-editor. Stan Renard (University of Texas at San Antonio) and Courtney Blankenship (Western Illinois University) who are experts in music business and marketing have joined Trax on the Trail’s roster of contributors. Haley Strassburger, a firstyear music student at Georgia College, will serve a four-year term as research assistant on the project.

Also in preparation for 2020, Trax on the Trail staff will redesign the website and database to improve usability.

Georgia College computer science majors Michael New, Louis Jourdan, and Taylor Clark will be spearheading these efforts. Trax on the Trail continues to expand its educational offerings. Course materials developed in collaboration with faculty and students at the University of Georgia and Trinity University have recently been added to the website.

We also have several upcoming events to wrap up our coverage of 2016. In November, Trax creator Dana Gorzelany-Mostak will join Travis Gosa (Cornell University), Justin Patch (Vassar College), Emily Abrams Ansari (Western University), and Trax co-editor James Deaville (Carleton University) for a roundtable on the 2016 election at the American Musicological Society Conference in Rochester, NY. The work of Trax contributors will be published in the winter 2018 special issue of American Music.

Musicologists, educators, scholars, and organizations interested in collaborating with Trax on the Trail are encouraged to contact Dana Gorzelany-Mostak, creator and co-editor of Trax on the Trail and assistant professor of music at Georgia College. She can be reached at [email protected] or 478-445-8630.