The Faculty-Graduate seminar is an intimate intellectual community that comes together to discuss work in progress around a common theme across a wide range of disciplines. Our goal is to establish a small but intellectually diverse and committed group of scholars who will attend all meetings and engage in sustained discourse during the year. Each meeting lasts one hour and twenty minutes followed by dinner. Given these goals and the limited meeting space, we will be accepting only twelve (12) graduate students into each semester’s seminar. We encourage graduate students to commit to both semesters and preference for spring registration will be given to students engaged in the fall seminar. Participation in the African American Studies’ Faculty-Graduate Seminar for one academic year or the equivalent (two semesters) will fulfill one of the requirements for the AAS Graduate Certificate

The Black 1980s: Promises of Inclusion, Perils of Access

From the end of the civil rights struggles of the 1960s to the mid 1990s, Black life in the United States and beyond underwent profound political, social and economic changes.  These transformations have been buried under the language of “post-civil rights era”, telling us little of how that aftermath was experienced in Black communities and among Black people. It remains a period seemingly impervious to historical treatment and understanding. The purpose of our speaker series is to bring light to the tumultuous time of twilight of the twentieth century. Black political thought and struggle did not end with “the sixties” but it changed dramatically, often fractured along the lines of class and gender. The ‘War on Drugs’, demonization of single Black mothers, rising Black poverty and an incipient war on social welfare uneasily co-existed with a historic rise in Black political representation and the emergence of a small but significant Black elite. It was also a quizzical time in terms of the explosion of Black cultural production. Even as Black poor and working-class people were deeply reviled by those in power, Black culture dominated American society.  We seek to understand these developments, their contradictions, and the wide variety of responses they provoked. 

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and Joshua Guild are the AY25 Fac-Grad Seminar Faculty Conveners.

Meet The Speaker

Daphne A. Brooks is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of African American Studies, American Studies, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Music at Yale University. She is the author of Bodies in Dissent:  Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910 (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2006), winner of The Errol Hill Award for Outstanding Scholarship on African American Performance from ASTR; Jeff Buckley’s Grace (New York: Continuum, 2005) and Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound (Harvard University, February 2021).

Liner Notes for the Revolution is the winner of eleven book awards and prizes:

• the Museum of African American History (MAAH) 2021 Stone Book Award
• the 2022 Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award
• the 2022 ASTR (American Society for Theater Research) Barnard Hewitt Award for Outstanding Research in Theatre History
• the 2022 Music in American Culture Award from the American Musicological Society
• the 2022 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award
• the 2022 ATHE (Association for Theatre in Higher Education) Outstanding Book Award
• the IASPM 2022 Woody Guthrie Award—Outstanding Book Beyond First Monograph
• the 2022 Prose Award from the Association of American Publishers in Music & the Performing Arts
• the 2021 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Nonfiction
• the 2022 Popular Culture Association’s Shaw and Hazzard-Donald Award for Outstanding Work in African American Popular Culture Studies
• the 2022 Certificate of Merit—Best Historical Research on General Recording Topics, ARSC Awards for Excellence in Historical Recorded Sound.

Brooks has authored numerous articles on race, gender, performance and popular music culture, such as “‘Loud Dreaming’ with Toni Morrison and Cecile McLorin Salvant” in Ways of Hearing: Reflections on Music in 26 Pieces; “Sister, Can You Line It Out?:  Zora Neale Hurston & the Sound of Angular Black Womanhood” in Amerikastudien/American Studies, “‘Puzzling the Intervals’: Blind Tom and the Poetics of the Sonic Slave Narrative” in The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative, “Nina Simone’s Triple Play” in Callaloo and “‘All That You Can’t Leave Behind’: Surrogation & Black Female Soul Singing in the Age of Catastrophe” in Meridians. She is also the author of the liner notes for The Complete Tammi Terrell (Universal A&R, 2010) and Take a Look: Aretha Franklin Complete on Columbia (Sony, 2011), each of which has won the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for outstanding music writing. Her liner notes essays for Prince’s Sign O’ The Times deluxe box set and Omnivore Records reissues of Nina Simone’s early releases on Bethlehem were published in 2020 and 2021, respectively.

Brooks is the editor of The Great Escapes:  The Narratives of William Wells Brown, Henry Box Brown, and William Craft (New York:  Barnes & Noble Classics, 2007) and The Performing Arts volume of The Black Experience in the Western Hemisphere Series, eds. Howard Dodson and Colin Palmer (New York: Pro-Quest Information & Learning, 2006). From 2016-2018, she served as the co-editor of the 33 1/3 Sound: Short Books About Albums series published by Bloomsbury Press. With Prof. Brian Kane, she is the co-founder and co-director of Yale University’s Black Sound & the Archive Working Group, a 320 York Humanities Initiative. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, The Guardian, Pitchfork.com(link is external)(link is external)(link is external) and other press outlets, and her 2020 New York Times article, “One Hundred Years Ago, ‘Crazy Blues’ Sparked A Revolution for Black Women Fans” was awarded the 2021 ASCAP Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Award for outstanding article in the pop music field.

Brooks is currently editing an anthology of essays forthcoming from Duke University Press and culled from Blackstar Rising & The Purple Reign: Celebrating the Legacies of David Bowie and Prince, an international 3-day conference and concert which she curated.