Staff Profiles

Her doctoral dissertation [Her doctoral dissertation [Reclaiming the Lore: A Critical Reading of the Archives and Practices of Collectors of African American Folk Music in the American South, 1900-1950, University of Kent, June 2021] explored the different approaches to collecting African American music in the United States as elaborated by African American collectors, musicologists, ethnographers, composers, and educators. Focusing on the American South from the turn of the twentieth century, this dissertation reconstructed the meanings and intricacies of those who chose to remain in the South following the abolition of slavery and during the period defined by Jim Crow laws, the Great Migration, the New Deal, and the Great Depression. It used underexamined material from various archives to explore the collecting, performative and educational work of Zora Neale Hurston, Willis Laurence James, and John W. Work I, II and III, and trace the extent of their extensive collaborations and exchange with wide networks of people committed to recording, performing, and enlivening African American folk music. 

She is currently expanding and building on this research for her first monograph, Reclaiming the Lore: African American Music Collectors, Refusal and Anti-Preservationist Practices. This monograph centralises the history and the storytelling of African American musical expressions within various Black communities and Black run and led institutions such as schools, HBCUs, churches, musical associations, and workers' unions. It shows how their different modalities of collecting operated as a pedagogical tool and were inseparable from performing and sharing music as part of communal activity and means to redress rupture with past generations and renew intergenerational practices. It explores the critical role of national institutions such as the Library of Congress in securing white collectors' monopoly during the New Deal era and shaping the field's history, and attempts to understand what was at stake due to the physical and symbolic removal of cultural expressions and traditions by white collectors from the individuals and communities who created them. This study challenges the category and practices of the white expert collector who assumed to be specialised in other culture(s) of the historically disempowered people (who mainly were denied opportunities to inhabit such positions) while enjoying access and accolades that originated in slavery and reinforce structures of white supremacy and power. Inverting the racial dynamic in collecting, shifting white collectors to the background, and putting African American collectors at the centre, the book will offer a different mapping of the field of collecting.

She is working on two new projects: a new body of research that explores the collecting practice of Black collectors from both sides of the Atlantic and their relationships. This research will explore how African Americans positioned themselves as collectors when crossing the Atlantic and how they documented and narrated Black diasporic vernacular expressions. It will compare and juxtapose their approach with collectors who worked from within their communities in Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, and Haiti. The second project will take the form of an edited collection and exhibition titled WPA American State Guide Revisited, which focus on one of the New Deal's most ambitious enterprises and one of the richest cultural and textual repositories of the New Deal. The collaborative project includes contributions from scholars and practitioners from various fields - history, archaeology, activism, photography and visual arts.