Brent Hayes Edwards | |
|---|---|
 Edwards in 2009 | |
| Alma mater | Yale University (BA) Columbia University (MA, PhD) |
| Occupation | Academic |
| Employer | Columbia University |
| Notable work | The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism |
| Awards | Guggenheim Fellowship |
Brent Hayes Edwards is a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University.
Edwards attended Yale as an undergraduate, then completed an MA and PhD at Columbia.
Edwards has taught at Rutgers University [1] and now at Columbia, as well as Cornell's summer graduate program, the School of Criticism and Theory, [2] and the Dartmouth summer graduate program The Futures of American Studies. [3]
Edwards's first book is The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Harvard University Press, 2003). It examines black writers in the interwar period, focusing on sites of interaction between Anglophone and Francophone black writers to develop an argument about the generative potential of translation, specifically in the black diaspora. [4] Among other influences, Edwards draws on Stuart Hall's use of the concept of articulation to develop a theoretical use of the French term décalage, "referring to a shift in space or time or the gap that results from it...[Edwards argues] that these disparate locations are, like joints, sites of potential forward motion." [5]
Edwards also edited the collection Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies (Columbia University Press, 2004) with Farah Jasmine Griffin and Robert G. O'Meally.
In 2009, Edwards edited a new printing of W.E.B. DuBois's The Souls of Black Folk from Oxford University Press.
Edwards serves on the editorial boards of Callaloo and Transition.
In 2023, Edwards co-wrote and edited the autobiography of jazz musician Henry Threadgill, Easily Slip into Another World: A Life in Music. [6]
In 2009, Edwards's graduate student Jean-Christophe Cloutier discovered a manuscript in Columbia's Rare Book and Manuscript Library in the papers of writer Samuel Roth. [7] In 2012, Edwards and Cloutier, in consultation with other experts and after examining archival materials and personal correspondence, authenticated the manuscript as a previously unknown 1941 work by Claude McKay, called Amiable With Big Teeth: A Novel of the Love Affair Between the Communists and the Poor Black Sheep of Harlem. [8] Henry Louis Gates, who served as one of the experts evaluating the manuscript's authenticity, called it a "major discovery...It dramatically expands the canon of novels written by Harlem Renaissance writers." [8]
In 2004, Edwards's book The Practice of Diaspora won the John Hope Franklin Prize from the American Studies Association [9] and the Gilbert Chinard Prize of the Society for French Historical Studies, and an honorable mention for the James Russell Lowell Prize of the Modern Language Association. [10]
In 2005, Edwards won the New York Public Library's Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Fellowship, [11] to spend one year researching a project on jazz in New York in the 1970s. [12]
In 2015, Edwards was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship [13] to pursue a book project entitled "The Art of the Lecture." [14]
In 2024 he received a PEN Oakland – Josephine Miles Award for Easily Slip Into Another World: A Life in Music, coauthored with Henry Threadgill.
Festus Claudius "Claude" McKay OJ was a Jamaican-American writer and poet. He was a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance.
Henry Threadgill is an American composer, saxophonist and flautist. He came to prominence in the 1970s leading ensembles rooted in jazz but with unusual instrumentation and often incorporating other genres of music. He has performed and recorded with several ensembles: Air, Aggregation Orb, Make a Move, the seven-piece Henry Threadgill Sextett, the twenty-piece Society Situation Dance Band, Very Very Circus, X-75, and Zooid.
George Theophilus Walker was an American composer, pianist, and organist, and the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music, which he received for his work Lilacs in 1996. Walker was married to pianist and scholar Helen Walker-Hill between 1960 and 1975. Walker was the father of two sons, violinist and composer Gregory T.S. Walker and playwright Ian Walker.
Arch Colson Chipp Whitehead is an American novelist. He is the author of nine novels, including his 1999 debut The Intuitionist; The Underground Railroad (2016), for which he won the 2016 National Book Award for Fiction and the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction; and The Nickel Boys, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction again in 2020, making him one of only four writers ever to win the prize twice. He has also published two books of nonfiction. In 2002, he received a MacArthur Fellowship.
Gwendolyn B. Bennett was an American artist, writer, and journalist who contributed to Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life, which chronicled cultural advancements during the Harlem Renaissance. Though often overlooked, she herself made considerable accomplishments in art, poetry, and prose. She is perhaps best known for her short story "Wedding Day", which was published in the magazine Fire!! and explores how gender, race, and class dynamics shape an interracial relationship. Bennett was a dedicated and self-preserving woman, respectfully known for being a strong influencer of African-American women rights during the Harlem Renaissance. Throughout her dedication and perseverance, Bennett raised the bar when it came to women's literature and education. One of her contributions to the Harlem Renaissance was her literary acclaimed short novel Poets Evening; it helped the understanding within the African-American communities, resulting in many African Americans coming to terms with identifying and accepting themselves.
Rutgers University–Camden is one of three regional campuses of Rutgers University, a public land-grant research university consisting of four campuses in New Jersey. It is located in Camden, New Jersey. Founded in 1926 as the South Jersey Law School, Rutgers–Camden began as an amalgam of the South Jersey Law School and the College of South Jersey. It is the southernmost of the three regional campuses of Rutgers—the others being located in New Brunswick and Newark. It is classified among "R2: Doctoral Universities – High research activity". In 2024 the school was ranked 48th among the top public universities and 98th among national universities by US News and World Report
James S. Shapiro is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University who specializes in Shakespeare and the Early Modern period. Shapiro has served on the faculty at Columbia University since 1985, teaching Shakespeare and other topics, and he has published widely on Shakespeare and Elizabethan culture.
Mat Johnson is an American fiction writer who works in both prose and the comics format. In 2007, he was named the first USA James Baldwin Fellow by United States Artists.
James Mercer Langston Hughes was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist from Joplin, Missouri. One of the earliest innovators of the literary art form called jazz poetry, Hughes is best known as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance. He famously wrote about the period that "the Negro was in vogue", which was later paraphrased as "when Harlem was in vogue."
Annette Gordon-Reed is an American historian and law professor. She is currently the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard University and a professor of history in the university's Faculty of Arts & Sciences. She is formerly the Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History at Harvard University and the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Gordon-Reed is noted for changing scholarship on Thomas Jefferson regarding his relationship with Sally Hemings and her children.
T. J. Stiles is an American biographer who lives in Berkeley, California. His book The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt won a National Book Award and the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography. His book Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America received the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for History.
Robert Adamson Bone was a scholar of African-American literature and a professor of English at Columbia University.
Leith Patricia Mullings was a Jamaican-born author, anthropologist and professor. She was president of the American Anthropological Association from 2011–2013, and was a Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Mullings was involved in organizing for progressive social justice, racial equality and economic justice as one of the founding members of the Black Radical Congress and in her role as President of the AAA. Under her leadership, the American Anthropological Association took up the issue of academic labor rights.
Marianne Hirsch is the William Peterfield Trent Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and Professor in the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality.
Kellie Jones is an American art historian and curator. She is a Professor in Art History and Archaeology in African American Studies at Columbia University. She won a MacArthur Fellowship in 2016. In 2023, she was elected to the American Philosophical Society.
The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism is 2003 book on literary history, criticism and theory by Brent Hayes Edwards.
Farah Jasmine Griffin is an American academic and professor specializing in African-American literature. She is William B. Ransford Professor of English and Comparative Literature and African-American Studies, chair of the African American and African Diaspora Studies Department, and Director Elect of the Columbia University Institute for Research in African American Studies at Columbia University.
Romance in Marseille is a novel by Claude McKay. The novel was published posthumously in 2020, 87 years after it was written, as the original editors considered the novel too transgressive for its time. It is McKay's second posthumously published novel in recent years.
Joshua Bennett is an American author, professor and artist. He is a Professor of Literature and Distinguished Chair of Humanities at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Heather Clark is an American writer, literary critic and academic. Her biography of poet Sylvia Plath, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize. She is also the author of The Grief of Influence: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (2011) and The Ulster Renaissance: Poetry in Belfast 1962–1972 (2006).
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