SPEAKER SERIES
Black Culture / Black Life
Adrienne Adams
University of Southern California
Born and raised in Las Vegas, Nevada, Adrienne Adams (they/them) is a blaxican oral historian, public programmer, and 4th year Ph.D. student in American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. Their dissertation, tentatively titled Black Obsolescence, is a media archaeology and cultural studies project that brings together histories of mundane technologies & media– VHS/beta tapes, the xerox machine, the handheld recorder, and public broadcast television–with black diasporic queer & trans vernacular practices between the 1980s & early 2000s. In doing so, they seek to theorize what obsolescence and use means in light of technologies deemed out of fashion & blackness’ interminable availability/violation under modernity.
Nikki Greene
Nikki A. Greene, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of Art History at Wellesley College. She has traveled internationally to deliver lectures on the Arts of the African diaspora, including to Chile, England, Ethiopia, Italy, and South Africa.
Her book, Grime, Glitter, and Glass: The Body and The Sonic in Contemporary Black Art (Duke University Press, October 2024) presents a new interpretation of the work of Renée Stout, and Radcliffe Bailey, and María Magdalena Campos-Pons, and considers the intersection between the body, black identity, and the sonic possibilities of the visual using key examples of painting, sculpture, photography, performance, and installation. Grime, Glitter and Glass was awarded a Wyeth Foundation for American Art Publication Grant by the College Art Association. In January 2021, Greene served as a co-producer of When We Gather, a three-minute film based on an extraordinary vision by María Magdalena Campos-Pons who was moved by the election of Kamala Harris as Vice-President-elect of the United States and directed by the talented filmmaker Codie Elaine Oliver.
Endia Hayes
Endia Hayes is a scholar of what she describes as Black feminist sensory cultural study, a set of inquiries traversing the fields of cultural, Black, gender and sexuality studies alongside sociology. Dr. Hayes earned her Ph.D. in Sociology from Rutgers University and is currently the 2024-2025 Thurgood Marshall Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of African and African American Studies at Dartmouth College. Her writing has appeared in journals such as The Black Scholar, Literature and Medicine, Southern Cultures, and Gastronomica alongside pivotal anthologies like Black Feminist Sociology and Black Women and Da 'Rona. She has held fellowships with The Center for Black, Brown, and Queer Studies and the Global Black Feminisms Summer Lab, among others.
Aneeka Henderson
Aneeka Henderson’s research has been published in Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society and in African American Culture and Society After Rodney King Her scholarly interests include late twentieth-century African American fiction, film, and music. Supported by the American Association of University Women Postdoctoral Research Leave Fellowship, the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in the Social Sciences at Duke University, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's Institute for Citizens and Scholars Fellowship, Henderson's authored, Veil and Vow: Marriage Matters in Contemporary African American Culture (University of North Carolina Press | Gender and American Culture Series), which places familiar, politicized questions about the crisis of African American marriage in conversation with a rich, but underexamined cultural archive of fiction, film, and music. Veil and Vow was the 2021 Finalist for the Outstanding First Book Prize, Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Disapora.
Allia Martin
Allie Martin is an ethnomusicologist that explores the relationships between race, sound, and gentrification in Washington, DC. Utilizing a combination of ethnographic fieldwork and digital humanities methodologies, she considers how African-American people in the city experience gentrification as a sonic, racialized process. Her work has been supported by the Ford Foundation, the Smithsonian Institution, the Society for American Music, and the American Musicological Society.
Matthew Morrison
Matthew D. Morrison, a native of Charlotte, North Carolina, is an Associate Professor in the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Matthew holds a Ph.D. in Musicology from Columbia University, an. M.A. in Musicology from The Catholic University of America, and was a Presidential music scholar at Morehouse College where he studied violin and conducting. His research focuses on the relationship between (racial) identity, performance, property, copyright law, and inequities within the history of American popular music and beyond. Prior to his appointment at NYU, Professor Morrison was a Postdoctoral Faculty Fellow through NYU’s Office of the Provost, and he has served as adjunct faculty at Vassar College, as well as Dean of Faculty for the W. E. B. Du Bois Scholars Institute housed at Princeton University.
Professor Morrison has given a range of talks and keynotes at institutions such as Cambridge University, The University of Leeds, the Old Town School of Folk Music (Chicago), The University of Chicago, The Dalton School (NYC), Temple University, Royal Conservatory of Music (Glasgow), and the University of Santa Barbara, among others. His book, Blacksound: Making Race in Popular Music in the United States, is published by The University of California Press in Spring 2024.
Brittnay Proctor
Brittnay L. Proctor received her PhD in African American Studies from Northwestern University, and is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Race and Media in the School of Media Studies at The New School University. Her research interests include: Black Studies; black popular music, black feminist theory, sound studies, visual culture, and performance. Her work has been published in the Journal of Popular Music Studies, The Journal of Popular Culture, American Literature, Sounding Out!, Feminist Formations, Hyped on Melancholy, African American Review, Reviews in Digital Humanities, and ASAP/Journal.
She is the author of, Minnie Riperton’s Come to My Garden (33 1/3) (Bloomsbury Press). She is also working on a second book manuscript which draws on LP records and Compact Disc’s (CD’s), in order to trace the sonic and visual discourses of gender and sexuality in funk music in the United States post-1960.
Scott Poulson-Bryant
University of Michigan
Scott Poulson-Bryant is a cultural historian and critic. His main areas of specialization are African American popular culture and Performance Studies, with teaching and research focuses on Hollywood film, black popular music, 20th and 21st century U.S. drama, genre fiction, gender and sexuality studies, and creative nonfiction writing. He received his B.A. in American Civilization from Brown University and his M.A in English and Ph.D. in American Studies from Harvard, where he also taught in the Program in History and Literature and received numerous certificates of distinction in teaching.
His research has appeared in The Journal of Popular Music Studies, American Studies, Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International, and Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly, and he is currently finishing his monograph Everybody is a Star: Race, Glamour, and Citizenship in 1970s US Popular Culture. Prior to academia, he worked as a journalist, publishing several articles in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, and The Village Voice, among other publications, and he was one of the founding editors of VIBE Magazine. His books include HUNG: A Meditation on the Measure of Black Men in America (Doubleday) and The VIPs: A Novel (Broadway/Random House).
