the young people's professor

Chances are if you're graduate student of color at one the nation's "elite" research universities, you probably know a thing or two about the "musical chairs" that goes on among top faculty of color. It seems as though every semester, especially among professors moving from "assistant professor" to "associate professor" status, folks are packing their bags and moving somewhere else.

Sometimes its hard for a brother to keep up! But as of fall 2006 I know that:

Kellie Jones, a popular art historian of black visual arts, has moved from Yale's department of African American Studies and Art History to Columbia's department of Art History.

Gayatri Gopinath, formerly at UC-Davis and Harvard in Women's Studies, is now at NYU in American Studies.

Jill Lane, a graduate of NYU's Performance Studies department and formerly on faculty at Yale in American Studies, is now back at NYU, this time on faculty in Spanish and Portuguese.

Kyra Gaunt, an ethnomusciologist specializing in African American musical cultures, has moved from NYU's department of Ethnomusciology to the department of Fine & Performing Arts at Baruch College.


These are all fantastic women of color academics, and I wish them the best at their new "homes"!

On a slightly different note, this fall also marks an interesting "first" for the field of performance studies. In what I believe is unprecedented, the country's two leading departments of performance studies (NYU and Northwestern) are now both Chaired by queer men of color. Jose Esteban Munoz, a leading scholar in queer and critical race theory and author of Disidentifications:Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics is now Chair at NYU and E. Patrick Johnson, a pioneering ethnographer in "black queer studies" and author of Appropriating Blackness is now Chair at Northwestern. Lets hope this moment is indicative of the future for the field.