Event

Join Penn’s Guthrie Ramsey, Jr., Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of Music, in conversation with Shana Redmond, Professor of Musicology and African American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, for our first Center for Africana Studies Faculty Research Colloquium.

Ramsey will discuss his new music project, “A Spiritual Vibe, Vol. 1” a collection of spiritual songs, and Redmond will discuss her latest book, Everything Man: The Form and Function of Paul Robeson, in which she “traces Robeson's continuing cultural resonances in popular culture and politics.” Both will perform a musical selection and also discuss their activism.

The CFAS Faculty Research Colloquium highlights the emergent and most recent conversations in the field of Africana Studies.

Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr.
Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of Music, University of Pennsylvania

A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr. is a music historian, pianist, composer, and the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of Music at the University of Pennsylvania. A widely-published writer, he’s the author of Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop (2003), and The Amazing Bud Powell: Black Genius, Jazz History and the Challenge of Bebop (2013).

Dr. Ramsey is co-author beside Samuel A. Floyd, Jr., with Melanie Zeck of The Transformation of Black Music: The Rhythms, the Songs and the Ships of the African Diaspora (2017) and editor of Rae Linda Brown, The Heart of a Woman: The Life and Music of Florence B. Price (2020).

Shana L. Redmond
Professor of Musicology and African American Studies, University of California, Los Angeles

Shana L. Redmond is an interdisciplinary scholar of music, race, and politics. Prior to receiving her combined Ph.D. in African American Studies and American Studies from Yale University, Redmond studied Music and African American Studies at Macalester College where she trained as a vocalist.

Throughout her education and career, music has been at the center of her thinking—as subject, agent, and method—and activates her research and teaching interests in racial formation, political cultures, nationalism, labor, and decolonization. Her focus has been to understand the ways in which music is used as a strategy within the liberation politics and social movements of the African world.

She is the the author of Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora (New York University Press, 2014), which is an interdisciplinary cultural history that tracks the songs that organized the modern Black world. Her most recent book, Everything Man: The Form and Function of Paul Robeson (Duke University Press, January 2020), develops the theory of “antiphonal life” in order to track Robeson’s sonic travels, form, and animation throughout the twentieth century. Redmond is currently at work on two books: the first, The Song that Saved the World, interrogates aid music and racial benevolence, while the second, The Next Jubilee, tracks the possible impossible in Black music. She is the series co-editor for “Phono: Black Music and the Global Imagination” with the University of California Press and an editorial board member for the “Music and Social Justice” series with the University of Michigan Press. She is also a contributor to and co-editor of Critical Ethnic Studies: A Reader (Duke University Press, 2016).