Carolina Seminars Advisory Board

Dr. Naomi André (David G. Frey Distinguished Professor, Musicology). Dr. André’s research focuses on opera and issues surrounding gender, voice, and race. Her publications include topics on Italian opera, Schoenberg, women composers, and teaching opera in prisons. Her books, including, Voicing Gender: Castrati, Travesti, and the Second Woman in Early Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera (2006) and Blackness in Opera (2012, co-edited collection) focus on opera from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries and explore constructions of gender, race and identity. African Performance Arts and Political Acts (2021, co-edited collection) focuses on how performance and the arts shape the narratives of cultural history and politics on the African continent. Black Opera: History, Power, Engagement (2018) is a monograph on staging race and history in opera today in the United States and South Africa.

Layne_Priscilla

Priscilla Layne (Professor of German; Adjunct Associate Professor of African and Afro-American Studies; Director of the Center for European Studies). Priscilla’s first book, White Rebels in Black: German Appropriation of Black Popular Culture, is forthcoming April 2018 with the University of Michigan Press. In this book, she examines how, following WWII, German artists often associated white, rebellious male characters with black popular culture, because black culture functioned as a metaphor for rebellion. Priscilla is currently working on her second book, Out of this World: Afro-German Afrofuturism, which focuses on Afro-German authors’ use of Afrofuturist concepts in literature and theater. In addition to this project, some of the broader themes she is interested in are German national identity, conceptions of race and self/other in Germany, cross-racial empathy, postcolonialism, and rebellion.

Joseph F Jordan’s work focuses on diaspora social justice movements and the cultural politics of race, identity and artistic production in the diaspora. Selected published work includes: Cabral, Solidarity and the African Diaspora in the Americas in Cabral no Cruzamento de Épocas:Comunicações e Discursos Produzidos no II Simpósio Internacional Amílcar Cabral (2013); Can the Artist Speak? Hamid Kachmar’s Subverise Redemptive Art of Resistance in Bodies of Knowledge: Interviews, African Art, and Scholarly Narratives (Indiana); and The Call of Revolution: The Anti-Apartheid Movement in the 1970’s in No Easy Victories: African Liberation and American Activists, 1953-2002. (Africa World Press).

Kristan Shawgo is a Social Sciences Librarian at the University Libraries of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH), serving as the library liaison for the departments, programs, and centers of Communication, Cultural Studies, Public Policy, Sexuality Studies, Sociology, Women’s & Gender Studies, the Carolina Women’s Center, and the UNC LGBTQ Center. She chairs our University Libraries’ IDEA Council and our IDEA Action Committee. Her interest in library work is rooted in how we support communities with our library collections and services, how we can strengthen these connections through collaboration and meaningful engagement, and working towards anti-racism, equity, inclusion, and social justice. She received an MSLS from UNC-CH, an MSW with a concentration in community and administrative practice from the Jane Addams College of Social Work at University of Illinois at Chicago, and a BA in sociology and psychology with a concentration in women’s studies (now, women’s & gender studies) from Drake University.