After graduating from Columbia University in 2016, I embarked on the MSt project, Deep River: The Negro Spiritual and Black Intellectual Thought, 1900-1930. I continued to the DPhil to study the life and work of the Black singer and composer, Harry T. Burleigh whose career broke social and racial barriers by working back and forth across the color line of Jim Crow from the tail end of the Gilded Age through the early decades of the twentieth-century.
My DPhil thesis, The New Negro: Harry T. Burleigh and Black Art Music in Jim Crow New York situated him amongst a network of intellectuals and culture-makers in New York who became architects of Black modernity in music and pre-figured the later Black literary intervention of the Harlem Renaissance.
I am engaged in public history in New York while I begin work on a monograph which will extend my DPhil work about Black Americans who brought their aesthetics, cultural memory, historical imagination to the still nascent American music in the long nineteenth century.
