TEACHING & RESEARCH INTERESTS

My passion and talent for interdisciplinary study are a natural fit with the liberal arts college, the milieu for interdisciplinary studies seminal to the development of new theories and frameworks. Although it is generally thought that liberal arts colleges weigh teaching more heavily than do research universities, it has been my experience, both as a liberal arts college student and teacher, that effective teaching grows out of research practice.  A research focus enables the academic to structure teaching as a continually evolving process, resulting in lively courses for students that equip them with the necessary skills to carry out their own research.  Certainly, the process of articulating research topics and facilitating discussion around them has clarified and deepened my scholarship in the areas of African American studies, specifically literature, history and music, African American and women’s history more broadly defined, and museum studies. The variety of my teaching and research interests are motivated by the issues discussed below. 

My teaching principles include articulating clear expectations from students; formulating objectives for what students should understand and be able to use effectively; employing a variety of approaches to teaching during each session; and prompting students to critical and creative thinking, the most important and also the most challenging aspects of my teaching.  In order for students to acquire critical thinking skills, I design course assignments that allow them to evaluate the logic and evidence of their own and others’ positions and to forge connections between disparate areas of knowledge. These teaching principles are practicable in the seminar, a defining component of liberal arts colleges, where the curriculum requires students to synthesize several sources of information into a coherent perspective and to dialogue about this process with their peers. 

Consequently, group work is a core feature of my course, “The Museum in African America,” where team projects reflect the collaborative nature of professional museum work.  Each group of 3 or 4 students plans a museum exhibit by writing an exhibit proposal, selecting objects worthy of display, and writing interpretive labels for each object.  During this process, students consult literature on material culture, museum display, and history. Another example of spurring critical thinking by bridging the application of insights and methodologies across several disciplines is an assignment from my course “Mapping Jazz: The Geography & Ethnography of African American Music.” In this course, students review geography theories of spatial practices; life histories; musical analysis; and jazz history in order to produce their own case studies of jazz communities around the country.  These “jazzographies” represent a paradigm shift in jazz studies, moving the discourse away from music criticism or jazz biography to the ways in which jazz music shapes distinct communities.  Fortunately, in the liberal arts college setting, students are equipped and eager to synthesize different forms of information (from different fields) because of the sharp focus, insight, and creative approaches they are encouraged to bring to each seminar and lecture.    

Presently, my scholarship is largely focused on theorization of African diasporic music and performance.  It is my position that much of the prevalent ethnomusicology and cultural study of music fails to delineate the principles and mechanisms by which African American music, and other African diasporic music, are connected by similar aesthetic philosophies.  In contrast, my work, “‘I Got Thunder (And It Rings!)’: Afrodiasporic ‘Voicing’ in the Music of Abbey Lincoln, Nina Simone and Cassandra Wilson,” draws on the original compositions of three singer/songwriters who negotiate their creative identity with Africa and the African diaspora to develop a theoretical framework for interpreting the core sonic and narrative aspects of African diasporic music.

                        
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