Daphne Harrison Lecture: A Harlem State of Mind

Earl Brooks is Associate Professor of English at UMBC. He currently serves as the Associate Director of the Dresher Center for the Humanities. His recent book, On Rhetoric and Black Music (Wayne State University Press, African American Life Series, June 2024), examines how Black music functions as rhetoric, considering its subject not merely reflective of but central to African American public discourse.

Michelle Scott is Professor of History, as well as affiliate faculty in Africana Studies; Gender, Women’s, + Sexuality Studies; and the Language, Literacy, and Culture Doctoral Program at UMBC. Her recent book, T.O.B.A. Time: Black Vaudeville and the Theater Owner’s Booking Association in Jazz Age America, (University of Illinois Press, 2023) is a study of the 1920s national black vaudeville theater circuit that trained Black entertainers including Cab Calloway, Count Basie, Bessie Smith, and the Nicholas Brothers.

James Smalls is Professor in the Department of Visual Arts and serves as affiliate faculty in Africana Studies and Gender, Women’s, + Sexuality Studies at UMBC. He is currently working on a book about the life, legacy, and visual significance of Senegalese performer Féral Benga (1906–57) and restore him to his rightful place in art history.

Camee Maddox-Wingfield is Assistant Professor of Sociology, Anthropology, and Public Health at UMBC. She is a cultural anthropologist with ethnographic research interests in cultural activism and identity formation among Caribbean and African diaspora dance communities. Dr. Maddox is currently working on a project that examines the interrelationship among dance, cultural citizenship, and spiritual orientation in Martinique’s bèlè dance tradition.

Matt Belzer is a Teaching Professor and Director of Jazz Studies in the Department of Music.