We are pleased to welcome Dr. Jayna Brown (Pratt Institute) at CDI for a presentation on her recent book discussing the work of improvisers such as  Sun Ra and Alice Coltrane.

The meeting will take place at 4pm ET online. For the meeting link please RSVP here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cdi-welcomes-dr-jayna-brown-tickets-184974221877

Jayna Brown’s areas of knowledge and interest include black expressive cultures, film, queer of color critique, anarchism, materialism and science fiction. Her first book, Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern (Duke University Press, 2008) won Best Book awards from both the American Society for Theatre Research and the Theater Library Association. She has also published on African American race film and popular performance in various journals including The Journal of Popular Music Studies, GLQ, Social Text and Women and Performance. Her new book, Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds (Duke University Press, forthcoming) traces black radical utopian practice and performance, from the psychic travels of Sojourner Truth to the cosmic transmissions of Alice Coltrane and Sun Ra.