A Harlem State of Mind: 100 Years of the Renaissance
featuring the UMBC Jazz ensemble
Location
Dance Cube
Date & Time
October 23, 2025, 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm
Description
Join us for a special celebration of the centennial of the Harlem Renaissance from an interdisciplinary perspective focused on music, history, literature, and art. Moderated by Camee Maddox-Wingfield, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology, a panel of UMBC faculty will explore the impact and legacy of this intellectual, social, and artistic movement.
The UMBC Jazz Ensemble, directed by Matt Belzer, will perform music selections from the Harlem Renaissance:
- Black and Tan Fantasy (1927 version) — Duke Ellington
- Black Beauty (1928) — Duke Ellington
- East St. Louis Toodle-oo (1927 version) — Duke Ellington/Bubber Miley
Panelists:
- Earl Brooks is Associate Professor of English at UMBC. He currently serves as the Associate Director of the Dresher Center for the Humanities. His recent book, On Rhetoric and Black Music (Wayne State University Press, African American Life Series, June 2024), examines how Black music functions as rhetoric, considering its subject not merely reflective of but central to African American public discourse.
- Michelle Scott is Professor of History, as well as affiliate faculty in Africana Studies; Gender, Women’s, + Sexuality Studies; and the Language, Literacy, and Culture Doctoral Program at UMBC. Her recent book, T.O.B.A. Time: Black Vaudeville and the Theater Owner’s Booking Association in Jazz Age America, (University of Illinois Press, 2023) is a study of the 1920s national black vaudeville theater circuit that trained Black entertainers including Cab Calloway, Count Basie, Bessie Smith, and the Nicholas Brothers.
- James Smalls is Professor in the Department of Visual Arts and serves as affiliate faculty in Africana Studies and Gender, Women’s, + Sexuality Studies at UMBC. He is currently working on a book about the life, legacy, and visual significance of Senegalese performer Féral Benga (1906–57) and restore him to his rightful place in art history.
- Camee Maddox-Wingfield is Assistant Professor of Sociology, Anthropology, and Public Health at UMBC. She is a cultural anthropologist with ethnographic research interests in cultural activism and identity formation among Caribbean and African diaspora dance communities. Dr. Maddox is currently working on a project that examines the interrelationship among dance, cultural citizenship, and spiritual orientation in Martinique’s bèlè dance tradition.
- Matt Belzer is a Teaching Professor and Director of Jazz Studies in the Department of Music.
Admission is free.
The Daphne Harrison Lecture is organized by the Dresher Center for the Humanities.
This event is funded by the Arts+ Initiative and the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, and is co-sponsored by the Department of Africana Studies; the Department of English; the Department of History; and the Department of Music.
