Daphne Brooks, a professor in the departments of African American studies and theatre studies at Yale, looks at what happened to two iconic blues women, Geeshie Wiley and Elvie Thomas, as well as the critics who loved them and chased after them. By placing the politics of queer archival studies and black performance theory in conversation with canonical blues historiographies, Brooks will explore the aesthetics and cultural resonances of Wiley and Thomas’s rare recordings.
Organized by the UCLA Department of Musicology and the UCLA Center for the Study of Women, the March 10 event also serves as the 14th annual Robert Stevenson Lecture. It's set for 3:30 p.m. in the Charles E. Young Research Library.
Brooks, who earned her Ph.D. in English at UCLA, has numerous writing and editing credits. The talk, titled "If You Should Lose Me’ The Archive, the Critic, the Record Shop and the Blues Woman" is free and open to the public. Register here.
