Department of American Studies

Penny Von Eschen

Kim Rowser — Sun, 04 Jun 2023 21:44:59 +0000

Penny Von Eschen

Kim Rowser Sun, 06/04/2023 - 17:44

Chair of American Studies, Professor of History and William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of American Studies

Office Hours: By appointment | Nau 233

pmv3c@virginia.edu

Education:

Ph.D. Columbia University, Department of History, 1994.

M.A. Columbia University, Department of History, 1987.

B.A. Northwestern University, Philosophy, 1982.

Penny M. Von Eschen is William R. Kennan Jr. Professor of American Studies and Professor of History and at the University of Virginia. Her scholarship is situated at the intersections of African American history, cultural history, the global cold war, and the study of the United States in global and transnational dimensions. She received her Ph.D. from the department of History, Columbia University in 1994. She is author of Paradoxes of Nostalgia: Cold War Triumphalism and Global Disorder Since 1989” (Duke University Press, 2022); Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War, Harvard University Press, 2004, and Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937-1957, Cornell University Press, 1997. She is a co-editor along with Manisha Sinha of Contested Democracy: Freedom, Race, and Power in American History, which includes, Penny M. Von Eschen, “Duke Ellington Plays Baghdad: Rethinking Hard and Soft Power from the Outside In,” Columbia University Press, 2007; and American Studies: An Anthology, Janice Radway, Kevin Gaines, Barry Shank, and Penny Von Eschen editors, Blackwell Press, January 2009. She co-curated “Jam Sessions: American’s Jazz Ambassadors Embrace the World,” a photography exhibition on the jazz ambassador tours, with Meridian International Center, Washington D.C., that opened in April 2008, and toured globally as well as in the United States. She is currently working on a book project exploring crises of authority in anticolonial counterpublics in the years following WWII.

Publications:

Books

Paradoxes of Nostalgia: Cold War Triumphalism and Global Disorder Since1989, Duke University Press, 2022.

Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War, Harvard University Press, 2004, First Runner-Up for the John Hope Franklin Prize of the American Studies Association, 2005.

Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937-1957, Cornell University Press, 1997; winner of the 1998 Stuart L. Bernath book prize of Historians of Foreign Relations; and the Myers Outstanding Book Award, of the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America.

Contested Democracy: Freedom, Race, and Power in American History, Manisha Sinha and Penny Von Eschen co-editors; includes, Penny M. Von Eschen, “Duke Ellington Plays Baghdad: Rethinking Hard and Soft Power from the Outside In,” Columbia University Press, 2007.

American Studies: An Anthology, Janice Radway, Kevin Gaines, Barry Shank, and Penny Von Eschen editors, Blackwell Press, January 2009.

Select Recent Essays

“The End of the Age of Three Worlds and the Making of the Trump Presidency,” in Liam Kennedy ed., Trump’s America, (University of Edinburgh Press, Fall 2020).

“From London 1948 to Dakar 1966: Crises in Anticolonial Counterpublics,” In Gyan Prakash and Jeremy Adelman eds., Inventing the World: Genealogies of Alternative Global Histories, (Bloomberg Press, 2022).

“Imperial Visions of the World: from confident to embattled empire,” in Mark Bradley, David Engerman, and Melani McAlister eds., The Cambridge History of America in the World, 2021.

“Roads Not Taken: The Delhi Declaration, Nelson Mandela, Václav Havel and the Lost Futures of 1989,” in Revisiting Ideology and Foreign Policy, Chris Nichols et al, eds., (Columbia U Press 2021).

“Soul Call: The First Word Festival of Negro Arts at a Pivot of Black Modernities,” in Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Number 42-43 November/2018, 124-135.

“Black Ops Diplomacy: The Foreign Policy of Popular Culture,” Scott Laderman and Tim Grunenwald eds., Imperial Benevolence, (University of California Press, 2018).

“Di Eagle and di Bear: Who Gets to Tell the Story of the Cold War?”

Ronald Radano and Teju Olaniyan eds, Audible Empire: Music, Global Politics, Critique, (Duke University Press, 2016), 189-208.

“Memory and the study of US Foreign Relations,” in Frank Costiogliola and Michael Hogan eds., Explaining US Foreign Relations, (Cambridge University Press, 2016) 304-316.

“Colloquy: Queering America and the World,” Laura Belmonte, Mark Bradley, Julio Capó Jr., Paul Farber, Shanon Fitzpatrick, Melani McAlister, David Minto, Michael Sherry, Naoka Shibusawa, Penny Von Eschen, Diplomatic History (2016) 40 (1) 19-80.

Public History:

Co-curator for “Jam Sessions: American’s Jazz Ambassadors Embrace the World,” photography exhibition on the jazz ambassador tours, with Meridian International Center, Washington D.C.: The exhibit opened on April 3, 2008 at the Meridian International Center, and has traveled within the U.S. Internationally, it was presented by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the State Department has was exhibited in 38 host venues in 27 countries in the Western Hemisphere, Africa, Central Asia, East Asia, Europe, and Eurasia. See link for full schedule: http://www.meridian.org/jazzambassadors/

Courses Taught:

“Racial Boundaries and American Film,” “Asian American Media Cultures,” “ Women and the Graphic Novel,” and a Engagement seminar entitled: Origin Stories: Identity, Migration, and Homelands.”

Website:

https://history.virginia.edu/people/profile/pmv3c

Joshua Miller

Carrington OBrion — Thu, 13 Jun 2024 20:34:54 +0000

Joshua Miller

Carrington OBrion Thu, 06/13/2024 - 16:34

Associate Professor of English

Bryan Hall 214, Tuesdays 11am-2pm and by appointment.

kvf3pc@virginia.edu

Education:

Ph.D. Columbia University, 2001

M.Phil, M.A., Columbia University, 1997

A.B. University of Chicago, 1994

Field and Specialties:

20th and 21-st Century US Literature and Visual Culture

Selected Publications:

Cambridge Companion to 21st Century American Fiction (Cambridge University Press, 2021)

Translation as Disconnection, special issue cluster, Modernism/modernity Print-Plus platform, co-edited with Gayle Rogers (2018)

Languages of Jewish Cultures: Comparative Perspectives [Michigan Studies in Comparative Jewish Cultures], co-edited with Anita Norich (University of Michigan Press, 2016)

Cambridge Companion to the American Modernist Novel (Cambridge University Press, 2015)

Accented America: The Cultural Politics of Multilingual Modernism [Modernist Literature and Culture Series] (Oxford University Press, 2011, paperback and hardcover)

“Out of Time, Out of Place: The Children of Other Lands and the Rise of Migrancy Modernism,” American Literary History 34.3 (Fall 2022): 943-67.

“Fugitive Atlas: Lyric Documentation and the Migrant Flow: An Interview with Khaled Mattawa,” co-authored with Hadji Bakara, JNT: The Journal of Narrative Theory 50.3 (Fall 2020): 444-50.

“Metaphor is Everything: A Conversation with China Miéville,” Michigan Quarterly Review 58.4 (Fall 2019): 595-604.

“In the Dream of their Dreams: MetaAmericanism in H.T. Tsiang’s And China Has Hands,” symplokē 25.1-2 (January 2018): 61-77.

“The Immigrant Novel,” in Oxford History of the Novel, Vol. 6: The American Novel, 1870-1940. ed. Michael A. Elliott and Priscilla Wald (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 200-17.

“Multilingualism” and “Introduction” (co-written with Anita Norich), Critical Terms in Jewish Language Studies: Frankel Institute Annual 2010-11 (Ann Arbor: Frankel Institute, 2011).

“American Languages,” in A Concise Companion to American Studies. ed. John Carlos Rowe (New York: Blackwell, 2010), 124-149.

“The ‘Gorgeous Laughter’ of Filipino Modernity: Carlos Bulosan’s The Laughter of My Father.” Bad Modernisms. Eds. Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 238-268.

“Multilingual Narrative and the Refusal of Translation: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee and R. Zamora Linmark’s Rolling the R’s.” How Far Is America From Here? (Rodopi: Amsterdam, 2005), 467-480.

“The Transamerican Trail to Cerca del Cielo: John Sayles and the Aesthetics of Multilingual Cinema.” Bilingual Games. ed. Doris Sommer (New York: Palgrave/St. Martin’s Press, 2003), 121-148.

“‘A Strange Addiction to Irreality’: Nothing Personal and the Legacy of Image-Text Collaborations” (with photographs by Richard Avedon, Walker Evans, and Jacob Riis), Re-Viewing James Baldwin: Things Not Seen. ed. D. Quentin Miller (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000), 154-189.

“The Discovery of What it Means to be a Witness: James Baldwin’s Dialectics of Distance” (with five photographs by Richard Avedon). James Baldwin Now. ed. Dwight A. McBride (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 331-359.

Kevin K. Gaines featured on PRX's The World

Carrington OBrion — Mon, 20 May 2024 14:58:51 +0000

Kevin K. Gaines featured on PRX's The World Carrington OBrion Mon, 05/20/2024 - 10:58

Nemata Blyden

Brandon Block — Fri, 26 Apr 2024 14:26:14 +0000

Nemata Blyden

Brandon Block Fri, 04/26/2024 - 10:26

Armstead L. Robinson Professor of 19th Century African American History

Minor Hall 227C

Nemata@virginia.edu

Education

PhD History, Yale University

MPhil History, Yale University

BA History and International Relations, Mount Holyoke College

Biography

A scholar specializing in African American, African Diaspora, and African history, Nemata Blyden is the author of African Americans and Africa: A New History (Yale University Press, 2019), and West Indians in West Africa, 1808-1880: The Diaspora in Reverse (University of Rochester Press, 2000), among other publications. Her teaching and scholarship center the experiences of African descended people, thinking about this history in insightful ways by looking at their history through an often-neglected lens of “Global Black” history. Her principal thematic interests have included nineteenth century African American history, African American engagement with Africa, as well as African and American and Caribbean migrations to Africa.

Her current project reflects her continuing interest in African American history and the connection between the African continent and its diaspora. A family biography of a black Atlantic family, the project attempts to tell the history of various spaces in the Atlantic world through the eyes of an extended family. Blyden holds an M.Phil. and Ph.D. in History from Yale University and a bachelor’s degree in History and International Relations from Mount Holyoke College. As a Professor in the Department of African American and African Studies, Blyden will teach a variety of courses on the Black experience.

Website

https://www.nematablyden.com

Selected Publications

African Americans and Africa: A New History. Yale University Press, 2019.

Gillet Rosenblith

Brandon Block — Fri, 26 Apr 2024 14:25:50 +0000

Gillet Rosenblith

Brandon Block Fri, 04/26/2024 - 10:25

Tamika L. Carey

Brandon Block — Fri, 26 Apr 2024 14:22:35 +0000

Tamika L. Carey

Brandon Block Fri, 04/26/2024 - 10:22

Associate Professor; Neh Daniels Family Distinguished Teaching Professor of English

Bryan Hall 132

tlc9ec@virginia.edu

Office Hours: Wednesdays, noon-3:00pm (on Zoom). Appointments can be requested at: http://officehourswithdrcarey.setmore.com

Education

PhD, Syracuse University

MA, Virginia Commonwealth University

BA, Virginia Commonwealth University

Specialties: Rhetoric and Composition, Cultural and Feminist Rhetorics, African American Rhetorics and Literacies, Black Women’s Writing and Intellectual Histories, the Memoir

Biography

I am an interdisciplinary scholar trained in Rhetoric and Composition Studies and specializing in Cultural Rhetorics, African American and feminist rhetorics, Black women’s intellectual histories and writing traditions, and the memoir. My first book, Rhetorical Healing: The Reeducation of Contemporary Black Womanhood (SUNY 2016), is a feminist critique of the discourses and strategies within Black women’s wellness culture throughout the last thirty years. The book contextualizes reeducation campaigns writers have carried out within self-help books, inspirational literature, and plays and films directed towards women and unearths the complex arguments and pedagogies used to restore communities to idealized states of wellness. I am currently working on projects that examine freedom of speech controversies among contemporary Black women intellectuals and healing practices within memoirs. My published work appears in such venues as Rhetoric Review, Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture, Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society, and Rhetoric Society Quarterly.

Selected Publications

Rhetorical Healing: The Reeducation of Contemporary Black Womanhood. SUNY Press, 2016.
“Fighting Words: A Review of Vincent Lloyd’s Black Dignity: The Struggle Against Domination.” Journal for the History of Rhetoric 26.1. (2023)
“Necessary Adjustments: Black Women’s Rhetorical Impatience.” (2020) Rhetoric Review. 39.3. 269-286.
“A Tightrope of Perfection: The Rhetoric and Risk of Black Women’s Intellectualism on Display in Television and Social Media.” (2018) Rhetoric Society Quarterly. 48.2, 139-160.
"A Note to Nicole on Becoming Tax-Free.” Stories from the Front of the Room: How Higher Education Faculty of Color Overcome Challenges and Thrive in the Academy. Eds. Michelle Harris, Sherrill L. Sellers, Orly Clerge, and Frederick W. Gooding, Jr. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2017.
“Review of Elaine Richardson’s PHD to Ph.D: How Education Saved My Life.” (2015) Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society.
“Take Your Place: Rhetorical Healing and Black Womanhood in Tyler Perry’s Films.” (2014) Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. 39.4. 999-1021.
“I’ll Teach You to See Again: Rhetorical Healing as Reeducation in Iyanla Vanzant’s Self-Help Books.” (2013) Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture. 15.
“Firing Mama’s Gun: The Rhetorical Campaign in Geneva Smitherman’s 1971-1973 Essays.” (2012) Rhetoric Review. 31.2. 130-147.

Kevin K. Gaines

Brandon Block — Thu, 25 Apr 2024 14:26:08 +0000

Kevin K. Gaines

Brandon Block Thu, 04/25/2024 - 10:26

Julian Bond Professor of Civil Rights and Social Justice

Nau Hall 421

kkg2u@virginia.edu

Education

PhD American Civilization, Brown University

BA, Harvard University

Biography

Kevin K. Gaines is the Julian Bond Professor of Civil Rights and Social Justice, with a joint appointment in the Corcoran Department of History and the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies. The new professorship was created to honor the legacy of Bond, the civil rights champion and former University of Virginia professor. Gaines’ current research is on the problems and projects of racial integration in the United States during and after the civil rights movement.

He is author of Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture During the Twentieth Century (University of North Carolina Press, 1996), which was awarded the American Studies Association’s John Hope Franklin Book Prize. His book, American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era (UNC Press, 2006), was a Choice Outstanding Academic Title. Gaines is a past president of the American Studies Association (2009-10).

His current research is on the integrationist projects of African American activists, artists and intellectuals, interventions that redefined blackness and acknowledged the relationship of structural and ideological forms of racism to racial capitalism, patriarchy, and homophobia.

Selected Publications

American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era. UNC Press, 2006.

Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century. UNC Press, 1996.

Nasrin Olla

Brandon Block — Thu, 25 Apr 2024 14:25:41 +0000

Nasrin Olla

Brandon Block Thu, 04/25/2024 - 10:25

Assistant Professor of English

Bryan Hall 440

nasrinolla@virginia.edu

Research and Teaching Interests

African Diasporic and African Literature; Anglophone and Francophone African Thought; Critical Theory and Continental Philosophy; Gender Studies and Queer Theory

Biography

Nasrin Olla is an Assistant Professor of English and African & African American Studies. Nasrin completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Cape Town and her PhD in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell University. Nasrin is currently completing her first book project, The Right to Opacity, which engages with the theme of alterity across a range of contemporary African and African diasporic literature. Nasrin’s work has appeared in b2o, the History of the Present, and the LA Review of Books. For more information please visit Nasrin’s website.

Nicole Mitchell Gantt

Brandon Block — Thu, 25 Apr 2024 14:25:05 +0000

Nicole Mitchell Gantt

Brandon Block Thu, 04/25/2024 - 10:25

Professor of Music (Composition and Computer Technologies)

Wilson 103

ybc5zh@virginia.edu

Education

MM Flute Performance, Northern Illinois University

BA Music, Chicago State University

Biography

Nicole Mitchell Gantt is an award-winning creative flutist, composer, conceptualist, bandleader and educator. A United States Artist (2020), a Doris Duke Artist (2012), and a recipient of the Herb Alpert Award (2011) her research centers on the powerful legacy of contemporary African American culture and black experimental art. For over 20 years, Mitchell’s critically acclaimed Chicago-based Black Earth Ensemble (BEE) has been her primary compositional laboratory with which she has performed at festivals and art venues throughout Europe, Canada, and the US. The former first woman president of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), Mitchell composes for contemporary ensembles of varied instrumentation and size (from solo to orchestra and large jazz band) while incorporating improvisation and a wide aesthetic expression. She is perhaps best known for her work as a flutist, having developed a unique improvisational language and having been repeatedly awarded “Top Flutist of the Year” by Downbeat Magazine Critics Poll and the Jazz Journalists Association (2010-2022). Mitchell initially emerged from Chicago’s innovative music scene in the late 90s, having started as a co-founder of the all-woman group Samana, and a member of the David Boykin Expanse. Much of Mitchell’s creative process has been informed by literature and narrative, with a special interest in science fiction. Her album, Mandorla Awakening (FPE, 2017), combines Afrofuturism with intercultural collaboration and was selected by the New York Times as the #1 jazz album of 2017. As a composer, she has been commissioned by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's Music NOW, French Ministry of Culture, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Newport Jazz Festival, the Art Institute of Chicago, the French American Jazz Exchange, Chamber Music America, the Chicago Jazz Festival, International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), and Bang on a Can. Mitchell has performed with creative music luminaries including Craig Taborn, Terri Lyne Carrington, Roscoe Mitchell, Joelle Leandre, Geri Allen, Mark Dresser, Anthony Davis, Myra Melford, Ed Wilkerson, Rob Mazurek, and Hamid Drake.

Website

https://www.nicolemitchell.com

Cole Rizki

Brandon Block — Thu, 25 Apr 2024 14:24:17 +0000

Cole Rizki

Brandon Block Thu, 04/25/2024 - 10:24

Assistant Professor of Latin American Studies

New Cabell Hall 457

cr3np@virginia.edu

Education

PhD, Duke University

MA, University of Wisconsin-Madison

BA, Smith College

Biography

Cole Rizki is a Latin Americanist and transgender studies scholar whose research examines the entanglements of transgender cultural production and activisms with histories of state violence and terror throughout the Américas. Rizki’s current book project, tentatively titled “Transfeminist Tide: Trans Politics Beyond Liberalism", examines Argentine travesti and trans politics and aesthetics to bring the study of democracy and its illiberal correlates to the forefront of trans studies. Moving across trans photographic archives of resistance, state intelligence and police archives, trans literary and cultural production, and activist practices that respond to state terror, his monograph establishes a new historical and cultural interpretation of trans politics as a response to illiberal state violence and its forms. Rizki is at work on a second monograph, tentatively titled “Hemispheric Trans Studies: American Transcultural Encounters and Practices.” This monograph will develop a distinct hemispheric orientation within the field of transgender studies by centering south-south exchanges to engage the work of theorists, political agents, and cultural producers working across Latin America and the US Global South. This project theorizes a travesti-trans of color analytic to track the geopolitics of repair and the reparative premises of both trans of color and travesti theory in the wake of multiple forms of state violence. He is invited guest editor of a special issue of NACLA: Report on the Americas on queer and trans resistance to violence (expected December 2024); co-editor of "Trans Studies en las Américas," a special issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly on Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Trans Studies (May 2019); and TSQ’s current Translation Section Editor (2020-present). His recent article “Familiar Grammars of Loss and Belonging: Curating Trans Kinship in Post-Dictatorship Argentina” was short-listed for the International Association for Visual Culture and the Journal of Visual Culture Early Career Researcher Essay Prize. His work appears in or is forthcoming with journals such as TSQ, Journal of Visual Culture, Balam, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, and Radical History Review.