Friends of Rutgers English Spring/Summer 2005

Inside This Issue
John Belton Wins a Guggenheim
From the Chair
Marianne DeKoven Wins Research Award
Beyond the Classroom: Reading Groups
Stacy Klein Wins Research Fellowship
Brent Hayes Edwards Wins Library Fellowship
Richard Koszarski on New Jersey’s Film History
A New Film Library
New Faculty Profile: Veena Kumar
Writers at Rutgers: Jean Valentine
Writers at Rutgers: C. K. Williams
Wesley Brown Retires
A Dramatic Farewell to Wesley Brown
A History of Rutgers English: Part 4
A History of Douglass English
Student Awards Bring Out the Best
The Burian Award
The Enid Dame Poetry Prize
A New Graduate Seminar
In Memoriam: Lexi Rutnitsky
Graduate Student Placement
Howard Travel Fellowships
Plangere Center Expands
Alumni Offer Career Advice
Thanks to Our Interns
More About Friends of Rutgers English

Archive of Previous Issues
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Article
PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION
Brent Hayes Edwards: The Spaces of Jazz
By Sarah MacMillan

Rutgers English congratulates Professor Brent Hayes Edwards on being awarded a one-year fellowship with the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. This international fellowship program supports fifteen scholars per year, from all fields, to do full-time advanced research in the library.

His new project will explore the evolution of jazz in the 1970s in New York City. Many jazz historians Professor Brent Hayes Edwardsassert that jazz “died” in that decade, overtaken by other forms of popular music, but Professor Edwards sees it differently. He argues that changes in the way jazz artists worked – such as, a movement away from clubs and major labels, and toward private sessions and smaller studios – encouraged more collaborative musical explorations. Eventually, these shifts led to the creation of many “jazz collectives” and independent recording labels, which Professor Edwards sees as useful examples of the way art has served as a basis for the building of black social and political institutions.

Professor Edwards has published articles on African- American literature and on jazz, and his book, The Practice of Diaspora, describes the cultural politics of the Paris and New York creative scenes in the 1920s and 30s. This new project seems fitting, given his most recent work as co-editor for an anthology called Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies. If you’re at the New York Public Library and hear someone humming a saxophone solo, look for Professor Edwards to congratulate him, and wish him success with his research.

More about the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers
More about Uptown Conversation
Professor Edwards wins two University awards

 

 

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