Notes on Contributors
- Notes on Contributors
American Studies thanks the Spencer Museum of Art for originating the traveling exhibition, "Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist" and hosting the symposium at which these papers were first presented. We also thank the museum for assisting us in publishing the images in this volume. Special thanks to Saralyn Reece Hardy, museum director and Susan Earle, curator of the exhibition, and Stephanie Knappe, coordinator of the exhibition and the symposium.
Terry Adkins is an installation artist, musician, activist, and cultural practitioner who for 20 years has pursued an ongoing quest to reinsert historically transformative figures to their rightful place in the landscape of regional and world history. Although his "recitals" combine sculpturally based installations with music, video, literature, and ritual actions that intend to uphold and preserve the legacies of his chosen subjects, Adkins' work is always abstract and lyrical. An inspiration to younger artists for his uncompromising stance, he is also a dedicated teacher as professor of fine arts at the University of Pennsylvania. His work is in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, The Spencer Museum of Art, The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the High Museum of Art among others. He has recently been honored as a United States Artists James Baldwin Fellow for 2008 and a Rome Prize Fellow for 2009.
Gerald Early is the Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters in the Department of English at Washington University in St. Louis, where he also directs the Center for the Humanities. He is currently series editor of Best African American Essays and Best African American Fiction, both annual anthologies published by Bantam Books.
Farah Jasmine Griffin is the William B. Ransford Professor of English and Comparative Literature and African-American Studies at Columbia University in the City of New York. She is the author of Who Set You Flowin?: The African American Migration Narrative (Oxford, 1995), If You Can't Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday (Free Press, 2001) and Clawing at the Limits of Cool: Miles Davis, John Coltrane and The Greatest Jazz Collaboration Ever, written with Salim Washington (Thomas Dunne, 2008). She is also the editor of Beloved Sisters and Loving Friends: Letters from Addie Brown and Rebecca Primus (Knopf,1999) co-editor, with Cheryl Fish, of Stranger in the Village: Two Centuries of African American Travel Writing (Beacon, 1998) and co-editor with Brent Edwards and Robert O'Meally of Uptown Conversations: The New Jazz Studies (Columbia University Press, 2004). She is currently Director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies. [End Page 4]
William J. Harris teaches poetry writing, American literature, African American literature, and jazz studies in the Department of English at the University of Kansas; he is currently writing a book of poems, tentatively titled, A Guy in a Black SUV and Other Poems. Among his publications are, The Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader, The Poetry and Poetics of Amiri Baraka: The Jazz Aesthetic and poetry in fifty anthologies, including Every Goodbye Ain't Gone: An Anthology of Innovative Poetry by African Americans and The Garden Thrives: Twentieth-Century African American Poetry.
Amy Helene Kirschke is an associate professor of art history at University of North Carolina, Wilmington. She is the author of Aaron Douglas: Art, Race and the Harlem Renaissance and Art in Crisis: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Struggle for African American Identity and Memory and the forthcoming edited volume, Common Hope, Common Sorrow: Women Artists of the Harlem Renaissance and One Hundred Years of Crisis, co-edited with Phil Sinitiere.
Stephanie Fox Knappe is a PhD candidate in the Kress Foundation Department of Art History at the University of Kansas, Lawrence. She was the exhibition coordinator for "Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist" and the symposium coordinator for "Aaron Douglas and the Arts of the Harlem Renaissance." She is the assistant curator of American art at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri.
David Krasner is associate professor and head of the acting program at Emerson College. He is the author and editor of eight books, twice awarded the Errol Hill Award from the American Society of...
