The Department  of Music is delighted to announce that Jazz Studies assistant professor Aaron Johnson will be a W. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University. Johnson will be in residence as a Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellow for the 2019–20 academic year, at work on Jazz Radio America: Commercial to Noncommercial, 1950 to Present.

In his official welcome, W.E.B. Du Bois Institute Director Henry Louis Gates, Jr. described the incoming group of scholars as,

“…one of our most distinguished and exciting cohorts of W. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute Fellows… We look forward to an extraordinary range of artistic and scholarly work next academic year. Afro-Asian solidarity, the erotics of race, Indo-Caribbean identity in New York City, witchcraft and law in the British Empire, a contemporary chamber opera inspired by secret gatherings of enslaved African Americans, bioethics and African philosophy, and climate change and security threat in the West African Sahel are among the exciting projects which the 2019-2020 Class of Fellows will be pursuing at the W. E. B Du Bois Research Institute, housed in the Hutchins Center.”

Congratulations to Dr. Johnson as he embarks on this prestigious fellowship!