Celebrating and reflecting on the legacy of Eileen Southern

In 1971, Eileen Southern, the first African-American woman tenured in Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, published her landmark monograph: The Music of Black Americans (currently in its third edition). We are faculty, graduate students and library staff at Harvard who see in the approaching golden anniversary of Professor Souther's accomplishment an opportunity to celebrate and reflect upon her work. 

Our endeavor has three components.

Archival research

We plan to inventory all of Southern's correspondents as preserved in fully processed archival collections now available for research at three institutions: Harvard University, the Center for Black Music Research and Fisk University. The results of this work will be shared in a https://snaccooperative.org/?redirected=1 radial graph, illustrating the context in which Southern performed her work. 

Oral history

We're also going to create new content in the vein established by Southern and her collaborators. Interviews were a major component of The Music of Black Americans as well as the journal Southern co-founded in 1973, The Black Perspective in Music. Some of the original interview subjects have agreed to be part of this project; if you'd like to join in too, check out our AMS oral history days. 

Exhibitions

Graduate students in seminars led by Professors Carol J. Oja and Braxton D. Shelley will curate an exhibition, which will go on display at Harvard University in 2021. This work will be undertaken in collaboration with Christina Linklater, Keeper of the Isham Memorial Library.

This library-classroom collaboration will share its specific findings and our general workflow with the academic and library communities, showing musicologists how we've engaged with archives and demonstrating for archivists some of the ways in which musicologists might wish to use collections.