Congratulations to Daphne Brooks (African American Studies) and Brian Kane (Music) on winning the 320 York Humanities Grant Awards for their project, “Black Sound and the Archive.” Brooks and Kane’s innovative proposal exploring black sound garnered an award of $50,000, the single highest amount awarded in the Humanities fund’s inaugural year.
Black Sound and the Archive will explore the untapped variety of black sound archives—moving beyond the records, musical recordings, and oral histories traditionally showcased—to stage a monthly collaborative workshop to bring out for collective study neglected items held by Yale’s preeminent black-culture collections and develop new ways of listening to the archive of black sound.
The first year’s study will culminate in an exhibit on campus of the newly-visible objects related to black sound culture.
In its second year, Black Sound and the Archive will launch a mid-level seminar for undergraduates to study these archives, create their own, and stage a public program inspired by the archives during the closing weeks of the project.
Scholars, curators, and notable performers will join the workshop to leaven and expand the collaborative research and teaching efforts. As a concluding project to capture new knowledge emerging from the two-year project, a special journal issue will contain published essays on the group’s discoveries.
View Daphne Brooks’ faculty page in the African American Studies Department: http://afamstudies.yale.edu/people/daphne-brooks