Columbia Jazz Studies

Columbia’s Jazz Studies Faculty

In full support of Columbia University’s expressed mission, the Center’s faculty is committed to offering students “a broad range of innovative multidisciplinary programs…through the earnest exploration of difficult questions,” thereby providing students from the United States and around the world with “the depth of understanding and intellectual flexibility they need to respond to the challenges in the years to come.”

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

Kevin Fellezs
Assistant 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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Ann Douglas
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.

Brent Hayes Edwards
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.

Farah Jasmine Griffin
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.

George E. Lewis
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.

Robert G. O’Meally
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) .

John Szwed
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 alsoLouis Armstrong Visiting Professor of Jazz Studies at Columbia  in 2003-04 and 2005-2007.

Christopher Washburne
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).

Kevin Fellezs
Assistant Professor
Department of Music/Institute for Reseerch in African American Studies

Kevin Fellezs received his PhD from the University of California, Santa Cruz (History of Consciousness, 2004). In 2004-6, he received a University of California President's Postdoctoral Fellowship, held in the Music department at the University of California, Berkeley. He taught at the University of California, Merced, before joining the Columbia faculty with a joint appointment in the Music department and the Institute for Research in African American Studies (IRAAS) in 2012. He is the author of Birds of Fire: Jazz, Rock, Funk and the Creation of Fusion (Duke UP, 2011). Fellezs has published articles in Jazz Perspectives, Journal of Popular Music Studies, and the Institute for Studies in American Music Newsletter. He has also published essays in a number of edited anthologies, including Alien Encounters: Asian Americans and Popular Culture (Duke University), One World Periphery Reads the Other: Knowing the “Oriental” in the Americas and the Iberian Peninsula (Cambridge Scholars), and Heavy Metal: Controversies and Countercultures (Equinox). He is currently writing a book on the performance of "Hawaiian-ness" in ki ho'alu (Hawaiian slack key guitar) performers, both Native Hawaiian and non-Hawaiian, in Hawai'i, California and Japan. He is currently conducting research for a cultural history of smooth jazz.

© 2008, Columbia University Center for Jazz Studies.

Last Updated September 2, 2008.