Moderators
RJ Smith is a writer/editor at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. He has written four books, including the award-winning Chuck Berry: An American Life and The One: The Life and Music of James Brown. He has been a columnist for the Village Voice and has written for the New...
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Speakers NH
Associate Professor, Department of Communication, Culture and Media Studies, Howard University
Natalie Hopkinson is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication, Culture and Media Studies at Howard University. She is the author of Go-Go Live: The Musical Life & Death of a Chocolate City(Duke University Press, 2012) and A Mouth is Always Muzzled: Six Dissidents, Five...
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DJ Lynnée Denise is an artist, scholar, and writer whose work reflects on underground cultural movements, the 1980s, migration studies, theories of escape, and electronic music of the African Diaspora. Her work on DJ scholarship has been featured at prestigious institutions and in...
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James B. Duke Distinguished Professor and Chair of African and African American Studies, Duke University
Mark Anthony Neal is the James B. Duke Distinguished Professor and Chair of African and African American Studies at Duke University. He is the author of several books including What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture (1999), Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture...
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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...
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Professor, Musicology, Global Jazz Studies, and African American Studies, UCLA
Shana L. Redmond (she|her) is a public-facing scholar of Black culture and politics and the author of Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora(NYU Press, 2014) and Everything Man: The Form and Function of Paul Robeson(Duke UP, 2020), which was...
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