Columbia’s Jazz Studies Faculty
Center for Jazz Studies Faculty
Ann Douglas
Parr Professor of Comparative Literature
Brent Hayes Edwards
Professor, Department of English and Comparative Literature
Farah Jasmine Griffin
Professor, Department of English and Comparative Literature
George E. Lewis
Professor, Department of Music
Robert G. O’Meally
Professor, Department of English and Comparative Literature
John F. Szwed
Professor, Department of Music
Christopher Washburne
Associate Professor, Department of Music
Affiliated Faculty
Krin Gabbard
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
State University of New York, Stony Brook
Margo Jefferson
Professor of Creative Writing
School of the Arts, Columbia University
Kellie Jones
Associate Professor
Department of Art History and Archaeology
Columbia University
Robin D.G. Kelley
Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity and History
University of Southern California
William Lowe
Barnard College
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Parr Professor of Comparative Literature
Professor Douglas teaches twentieth-century American literature, film, music, and politics, with an emphasis on the Cold War era, African-American culture, and post-colonial approaches. In Spring 2002, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences for her work in History. She received her B.A. from Harvard in 1964, B.Phil. from Oxford in 1966, and Ph.D. from Harvard in 1970. Before Columbia, Professor Douglas taught at Princeton from 1970-74 — the first woman to teach in its English Department. She received a Bicentennial Preceptorship from Princeton for distinguished teaching in 1974, and a fellowship from the National Humanities Center in 1978-79 after publishing The Feminization of American Culture (1977). She received an NEH and Guggenheim fellowship for 1993-94. Her study Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920’s (Farrar, Straus, 1995) received, among other honors, the Alfred Beveridge Award from the American Historical Association, the Lionel Trilling Award from Columbia University, and the Merle Curti Intellectual History Award from the Organization of American Historians. She has published numerous essays, articles and book reviews on American culture. She is currently at work on a book, Noir Nation: Hollywood Movies and American Urban Culture, 1940-1960.
Professor of English and Comparative Literature
Edwards received his B.A. from Yale (1990) and his Ph.D. from Columbia (1998). He taught at Rutgers University before joining the Columbia faculty as the Louis Armstrong Visiting Professor of Jazz Studies in Spring of 2007. He is the author of The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Harvard UP, 2003), which was awarded the John Hope Franklin Prize of the American Studies Association. With Robert G. O’Meally and Farah Jasmine Griffin, he co-edited Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies (Columbia UP, 2004). In 2002, he and Professor Griffin co-edited a special issue of Callaloo (Vol. 25 No. 1) on “Jazz Poetics,” which was the runner-up for the Best Special Issue Award of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. Edwards is co-editor of the journal Social Text, and serves on the editorial boards of Transition and Callaloo. He is currently working on two book projects: a study of the interplay between jazz and literature in African American culture; and a cultural history of “loft jazz” in downtown New York in the 1970s. He began research on the latter project as a Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library in 2005-2006.
Professor of English and Comparative Literature
Farah Jasmine Griffin is considered one of the top African-Americanists in the country. She received her B.A. from Harvard (1985) and her Ph.D. from Yale (1992) Professor Griffin’s major fields of interest are African American literature, music, history and politics. The recipient of numerous honors and awards for her teaching and scholarship, in 1996-97 Professor Griffin was a fellow at the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College. She is the author of Who Set You Flowin’?: The African American Migration Narrative (Oxford University Press, 1995), the co-editor (with Cheryl Fish) of Stranger in the Village: Two Centuries of African American Travel Writing (Beacon, 1998), and the editor of Beloved Sisters and Loving Friends: Letters from Addie Brown and Rebecca Primus (Knopf, 1999), and If You Can’t Be Free Be A Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday (The Free Press, 2001. Her most recent book, with Salim Washington, is Clawing at the Limits of Cool: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and the Greatest Jazz Collaboration Ever (Thomas Dunne Books, 2008.
Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music
The recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship in 2002, an Alpert Award in the Arts in 1999, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, George E. Lewis studied composition with Muhal Richard Abrams at the AACM School of Music, and trombone with Dean Hey. A member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) since 1971, Lewis’s work as composer, improvisor, performer and interpreter explores electronic and computer music, computer-based multimedia installations, text-sound works, and notated and improvisative forms, and is documented on more than 120 recordings. His published articles on music, experimental video, visual art, and cultural studies have appeared in numerous scholarly journals and edited volumes, and his widely acclaimed book, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (University of Chicago Press, 2008) received an American Book Award in 2009, as well as the Award for Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound Research from the Association for Recorded Sound Collections, and an award from ther Jazz Journalists Association for the Best Book on Jazz in 2009.
Zora Neale Hurston Professor of English
Founding Director, Center for Jazz Studies
Professor O’Meally received his B.A. from Stanford (1970) and his Ph.D. from Harvard (1975). His major interests are African American literature, music, and painting. He has written extensively on Ralph Ellison, including The Craft of Ralph Ellison (Harvard, 1980), and a collection of papers for which he served as editor, New Essays on Invisible Man (Cambridge, 1989). Prof. O’Meally has written a biography of Billie Holiday, Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday, and a documentary of the same name (which has been shown on public TV). He edited Tales of the Congaree (University of North Carolina, 1990), a collection of black folk tales; he co-edited a volume entitled History and Memory in African American Culture (Oxford, 1994). He is a co-editor of the Norton Anthology of African American Literature. His new projects include a monograph on painting, literature, and jazz, Seeing Jazz (Smithsonian, 1997); a five CD set with booklet, Jazz Singers (Smithsonian, 1997); and an edition of essays, The Jazz Cadence of American Culture (Columbia, 1998) .
Director, The Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University
Editor-in-Chief, Jazz Studies Online
Professor of Music and Jazz Studies
An anthropologist and jazz scholar, Professor Szwed's
publications range from anthropological studies of Newfoundland and the
West Indies to record liner notes and jazz journalism. Dr. Szwed has
authored or edited 15 books, including Space is the Place: The Lives and Times of
Sun Ra (1997), Jazz 101
(2000), So What: The Life of Miles
Davis (2002), and Alan Lomax:
The Man Who Recorded the World (2010). Doctor Jazz, a book included with
the CD set, Jelly Roll Morton: The
Complete Library of Congress Recordings by Alan Lomax, was
awarded a Grammy in 2005.
Dr. Szwed is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Jazz Studies Online,
perhaps the most widely-referenced portal on the Web for jazz research.
Most recently, JSO has begun a two-year project to build and test a
powerful database tool for research on the history of jazz with the
participation of a network of noted jazz scholars. The project has
received generous support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Dr.
Szwed has also received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim
Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation.
Dr. Szwed has appeared in a number of documentaries and television
specials. From 1980 to 1982 he was the music commentator on Terry
Gross' Fresh Air on NPR, and as a journalist, Dr. Szwed has written for
The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Village Voice, Wire, and
many other publications in the US and Europe. He is currently General
Editor of the Jazz Perspectives Book Series
for The University of Michigan Press.
Before he joined Columbia in 2008, Dr. Szwed was the John M. Musser
Professor of Anthropology, African American Studies, and Film Studies
for 26 years. He has also taught at Temple University, Lehigh
University, New York University, and the University of Pennsylvania,
where he was co-director of the Center for Urban Ethnography with
Erving Goffman and Dell Hymes, and Chair of the Department of Folklore
and Folklife. He was also
Louis Armstrong Visiting Professor of Jazz Studies at
Columbia in 2003-04 and 2005-2007.
Associate Professor of Music
Director, Louis Armstrong Jazz Performance Program
Christopher Washburne is Associate Professor in the Department of Music at Columbia University and is the head of the Center’s Jazz Performance program. He also holds a teaching position in the jazz department at the New School for Social Research. Professor Washburne is also a jazz scholar. In these capacities he has added a jazz component to the undergraduate music performance curriculum, while teaching four jazz (and classical) courses and starting Columbia’s first jazz dissertation forum. Washburne freelances as a studio musician and performs trombone, bass trombone, tuba, didjeridu, and percussion with various classical, jazz, rock, and Latin groups in New York City. He also tours extensively with various groups and has concertized throughout North America, Europe, Asia, Africa, South America, Central America, and the Caribbean.
He was the winner of the 1988 New England Conservatory Graduation Concerto Competition. In 1985 he spent two months living in Zambia studying the traditional music of that region. In 1993 he received a Mellon Fellowship to travel to and explore the rich musical traditions of Cuba. In 1996 he received a Sinfonia Foundation grant to assist in the research for his dissertation. He received his BM from the University of Wisconsin, his MM from the New England Conservatory (1988), and his Ph.D. from Columbia University (1999). Professor Washburne has published two books, Bad Music: the Music We Love to Hate (Routledge, 2004) and Sounding Salsa: Performing Latin Music in New York City (Temple University Press, 2008).
© 2008, Columbia University Center for Jazz Studies.
Last Updated September 2, 2008.
