Love, Literature and Oral History:
Transmitting our Stories

A Public Interview with Dr. Farah Jasmine Griffin

The Center for Oral History Research/INCITE (Interdisciplinary Center for Innovative Theory and Empirics) and the Institute for Research in African-American Studies presents a public interview with Dr. Farah Jasmine Griffin, William B. Ransford Professor of English & Comparative Literature and African American Studies, as a part of its 2014 Oral History Institute, “ Second Generation Memories and Stories.” The interview, which will focus on the power of love and the transmission of memory in African American communities, will be conducted by Janée Moses and Dr. Marcellus Blount will provide response.

WHEN: Wednesday, June 18, 2:00-4:30pm.

WHERE: Columbia University, Knox Hall, Room 509, 606 West 122nd Street, 5th floor. Campus Map.

Farah Jasmine Griffin is a professor of English and comparative literature and African American Studies at Columbia University, where she has served as director of the Institute for Research in African American studies. In addition to editing several collections of letters and essays she is the author of Who Set You Flowin’: The African American Migration Narrative (Oxford, 1995), If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday (Free Press, 2001) and Clawing At the Limits of Cool: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and the Greatest Jazz Collaboration Ever (Thomas Dunne, 2008).

Marcellus Blount, Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Co-Director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies, teaches American and African American literary and cultural studies at Columbia University. He has been a Research Fellow at the Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia, a Visiting Fellow at Wesleyan’s Center for Afro-American Studies, a Rockefeller Fellow at the Center for the Study of Black Literature and Culture at the University of Pennsylvania, and a Visiting Fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University. He has published essays in PMLA, Callaloo, American Literary History, and Southern Review. He co-edited Representing Black Men with George Cunningham. His first study is entitled “In a Broken Tongue: Rediscovering African American Poetry.” His current project is entitled Listening for My Name: African American Men and the Politics of Friendship. He was the Sterling Brown ’22 Visiting Professor of English at Williams College.

Janée A. Moses is a doctoral student at the University of Michigan in the American Culture Program. In May 2014, she earned a Master of Arts in Oral History from Columbia University. Her thesis, It matters whom she loves: An Oral History of the Life and Works of Amina Baraka, excavates the history of Black women participants of the Black Arts Movement and the importance of knowing whom they loved. In 2012, Moses earned a Bachelor of Arts in History from the University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on 20^th century American cultural history, women’s history, African American history, gender studies, literary studies, and love. Oral history remains her primary method in pursuit of re-examining history in order to advance our understanding of the present.