Notes on Contributors
- Notes on Contributors
Susan Bragg is Associate Professor of History at Georgia Southwestern State University. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Washington. Bragg’s research focuses on family values politics within social justice activism, and her earlier published essays explore African American family experiences in nineteenth-century California.
H. Zahra Caldwell is Assistant Professor at Westfield State University in the Ethnic and Gender Studies Department. She is a historian, educator, and cultural commentator who teaches in the fields of History, Black Studies, and Women Studies. Her professional and academic work is focused on unpacking and expanding the definition of resistance as discussed within the long struggle for African American freedom, particularly as it relates to African American women, representation, and image construction.
Janet Kong-Chow is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English at Princeton University, and affiliated with the Department of African American Studies and the Program in American Studies. She is a proud alumna of the Institute for the Recruitment of Teachers (IRT-Andover). Her research focuses on critical race theory, imperialism, and diaspora in hemispheric American literatures. Her current work examines crisis, risk, and contemporary poetics.
Erica Richardson is Assistant Professor in the English Department at Baruch College, CUNY. She received her B.A. from Wellesley College and her Ph.D. from Columbia University. Her research and teaching interests include African American print culture, Black women’s writing, and African American drama. Her current work considers the intimate discursive and epistemological relations between dispossession and Black life within an archive of Black literary production and social data from the end of Reconstruction through the 1950s.
Rachel Rubin is Professor of American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She is author of Creative Activism: Conversations on Music, Film, Literature, and Other Radical Arts, Merle Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee” (in the Bloomsbury 33.3 series), Well Met: Renaissance Faires and the American Counterculture, Immigration and American Popular Culture (with Jeffrey Melnick), and Jewish Gangsters of Modern Literature, and co-editor of Radicalism in the South Since Reconstruction, American Popular Music: New Approaches to the Twentieth Century, and American Identities: An Introductory Textbook. She is currently working on People’s Friendship in the Cold War: The Patrice Lumumba Peoples’ Friendship University in Moscow.
Michelle R. Scott is Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). Her research and teaching interests include African American history, women’s history, black musical culture, and civil rights movements. Interviewed for the website material for HBO’s Bessie, Professor Scott’s book, Blues Empress in Black Chattanooga: Bessie Smith and the Emerging Urban South, was published by the University of Illinois Press. Her forthcoming manuscript is entitled T.O.B.A. Time: Black Vaudeville and the Theater Owner’s Booking Association in Jazz Age America.
James Smethurst is Professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is the author of The New Red Negro: The Literary Left and African American Poetry, 1930-1946, The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s, The African American Roots of Modernism: From Reconstruction to the Harlem Renaissance, and Brick City Vanguard: Amiri Baraka, Black Music, Black Modernity. He also co-edited Left of the Color Line: Race, Radicalism and Twentieth-Century Literature of the United States, Radicalism in the South Since Reconstruction, and SOS—Calling All Black People: A Black Arts Movement Reader. He is currently working on Behold the Land: A History of the Black Arts Movement in the South.
Kristen M. Turner is a lecturer in the music and honor’s departments at North Carolina State University. A musicologist, her research centers on race and class in American middlebrow culture at the turn of the twentieth century. Her work has been published in the Journal of the Society for American Music, the Journal of Musicological Research, and in several collected editions including the Cambridge Companion to Gershwin.
Lucy Caplan teaches in the History and Literature program at Harvard University. Her current book project explores how early-twentieth-century African Americans redefined the genre of opera as a wellspring of antiracist activism, collective sociality, and aesthetic innovation. Her academic writing...
