Lehman Brady Visiting Joint Chair Professor in
Documentary Studies and American Studies at Duke University and
the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
The Center for Documentary Studies coordinates a visiting joint
chair professorship in Documentary Studies and American Studies
at Duke and UNC–Chapel Hill, known as the Lehman Brady Chair.
This collaborative, cross-campus arrangement affords significant
opportunities for study, research, and participation in educational
activities associated with distinguished writers, photographers,
filmmakers, and other practitioners and scholars of the documentary
arts. The Lehman Brady Professor teaches courses on both campuses
and engages in lectures, film screenings, and other events for students
and the general public.
The Lehman Brady Chair is supported by two endowment funds, one
established at the Center for Documentary Studies by the Lyndhurst
Foundation and the other established at Duke University by the bequest
of Lehman Brady, an attorney from Durham, North Carolina, who died
in 1995.
Click on the names below to read more about past and current Lehman
Brady Professors.
Rayna Green is a curator at the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, where she also serves as director of the American Indian Program and as documentary historian for the American Food and Wine History Project. A folklorist with a Ph.D. from Indiana University, she has served on several university faculties (e.g., Dartmouth College) and in public service institutions (e.g., the American Association for the Advancement of Science). She has continued to teach and lecture widely during her years with the Smithsonian.
Green has written or edited four books (The British Museum Encyclopedia of Native North America; Women in American Indian Society; That’s What She Said: Contemporary Fiction and Poetry By Native American Women; Native American Women: A Contextual Bibliography) and published many essays on American Indian representations, American Indian women, American identity, American Indian material culture, and American Indian food and foodways. Several of her short stories and essays on Native women and American identity have been widely reprinted and have served as standard reading for twenty years in courses in women’s studies, American Indian studies, and American studies (e.g., “The Pocahontas Perplex: The Image of American Indian Women in American Culture,” “The Tribe Called Wannabee: Playing Indian in Europe and America,” “Magnolias Grow in Dirt: Southern Women’s Bawdy Humor,” and “High Cotton”). Forthcoming in 2008 is her newest article on foodways, “Mother Corn Meets the Dixie Pig: Native Food in the Native South.”
Green is also known for her curation of museum exhibitions throughout the country and for documentary video and audio production. Appearing both in front of and behind the camera in many documentaries on American identity, she has played a primary role in the production of three documentary short films on Pueblo life and culture—We Are Here: 500 Years of Pueblo Resistance (scriptwriter/artistic director, Ciné Golden Eagle, 1992), Corn Is Who We Are: The Story of Pueblo Indian Food (co-director, Silver Apple, National Educational Film Festival, 1995), and From Ritual to Retail: Pueblos, Tourism, and the Fred Harvey Company (producer/director, 1995)—and in two pioneering audio recordings of Native women’s music: Heartbeat: The Voices of First Nations Women and Heartbeat 2: More Voices of First Nations Women (Smithsonian Folkways, 1995/1998). Her most recent video project, a documentary narrative with Julia Child, is In the Kitchen with Julia, following on her co-curation of the long-running popular exhibition Bon Appétit: Julia Child’s Kitchen at the Smithsonian.
Brett Cook Spring 2008
Brett Cook creates objects, experiences, and feelings that defy classification in any single discipline. His work has been shown at museums and galleries since 1991, concurrent with a practice manifested in public projects since 1984. The public works have been executed in the United States, from California to Maine, and internationally in Brazil, Barbados, and Mexico. His public collaborations include a South Central Los Angeles project addressing divinity; the Development/Gentrification Project installed in ten locations throughout Harlem; and a project addressing segregation at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. While some of his work has been commissioned by museums or public agencies, others have been self-initiated interventions on abandoned spaces. Cook has completed scores of these contemplative projects, often through an interactive and collaborative process. His use of participatory ethnographic strategies, progressive educational pedagogy, and community organizing connect his work to exceptionally wide audiences. He is a seasoned Ashtangi and student of many forms of yoga, meditation, and healing, which inform his process and products.
Cook’s work in museums and galleries can take a variety of forms, with a recurrent emphasis on painting, drawing, and photography. His museum work frequently includes elaborate installations that make intimately personal experiences universally accessible. His gallery installation work regularly includes documented participatory public projects, using a wide variety of media to retell the stories of transformation that occur through a process of social collaboration. Cook’s solo exhibitions include Revolution and Multifaceted at P.P.O.W. Gallery in New York and Meditations at the Zilkha Gallery/Wesleyan University. Group exhibitions include Portraiture Now: Framing Memory at the Smithsonian Museum National Portrait Gallery; Social Studies/Brown V. Board of Ed. 40th Anniversary, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign; Community Interactions, Wayne State University Gallery, Detroit Michigan; and Hip-Hop Nation, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, California.
Cook’s teaching practice is an extension of his public collaborations and similarly involves diverse communities in dialogue to generate experiences of reflection and insight. He has taught at all academic levels in a variety of subjects, and published in academic journals at Columbia and Stanford. Cook received a B.F.A. from the University of California at Berkeley and has had many residencies, including at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and the Headlands Center for the Arts in Marin, California.
Cook is currently the Lehman Brady Visiting Joint Chair Professor for Documentary Studies and American Studies at Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for Spring 2008.
David S. Cecelski
Fall 2007, Fall 2003,Fall 2001–Spring 2002
Historian David S. Cecelski--whose writing and teaching stems from his passionate commitment to the places, people, and politics of eastern North Carolina--has written extensively on civil rights and North Carolina coastal history. Known to many North Carolinians through his devotion to the public portrayal of history, Cecelski has contributed a monthly oral history series, "Listening to History," to the Raleigh News & Observer since June 1998.
Cecelski, recipient of an Outstanding Book Award from the Gustavis Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights and a Walter Hines Page Award for Literature, has published widely. His books include The Waterman's Song: Slavery and Freedom in Maritime North Carolina (2001), A Historian's Coast: Adventures into the Tidewater Past (2000), and Along Freedom Road: Hyde County, North Carolina, and the Fate of Black Schools in the South (1994). He co-edited Recollections of My Slavery Days (1999) and Democracy Betrayed: The Wilmington Race Riot of 1898 and Its Legacy (1998).
Cecelski's current work-in-progress, The Fires of Freedom: Abraham Galloway's Civil War, tells the story of Galloway's life as a fugitive slave, Union spy, and "rather swashbuckling" leader of former slaves in North Carolina.
A graduate of Duke University (B.A., 1982) and Harvard Graduate School of Education, Cecelski was the Whichard Distinguished Visiting Professor in Humanities at East Carolina University in 2000-01. He lives in Durham with his wife and two children.
COURSES
In fall 2001 Cecelski taught A World of Fisher Folk: In Search of the Coastal South, a seminar that explored and documented the history, culture, and struggles of the fishing and maritime communities of the American South. Special topics included the struggle for self-determination among the Gullah peoples of the Carolina Low Country; the saga of the last oystermen on Chesapeake Bay; the historic evolution of boatbuilding and other maritime trades along the Outer Banks; and the unsung stories of the oyster shuckers, crabpickers, and shrimp peelers who still making a living along the Pamlico Sound of North Carolina. The seminar emphasized the interrelation between the region’s social history and natural history, as well as an African American maritime heritage that has often been overlooked. The seminar’s fieldwork focused on the North Carolina coast. During the spring Cecelski’s students in Wars on the Homefront, 1940-2001 used documents to examine homefront life during WWII, Korea, Vietnam, and other U.S. military interventions, including the current “war on terrorism.” They explored the impact of wars on civil liberties, civil rights, and industrial and technology policy, labor activism, family life, and popular culture. They examined how wars have given rise to major social movements: civil rights, antiwar, and veteran rights movements. Students used local North Carolina and other Southern sources for their research projects. In fall 2003, Cecelski taught Documenting the Civil Rights Movement, a course in which students explored and documented the civil rights movement in North Carolina since World War II by recording the stories of people who experienced the African American freedom struggle firsthand.
Karen
Michel
Fall 2006–Spring 2007
Based in upstate New York, Karen Michel is an independent radio
producer who got her start in media as a guest on Art Linkletter's Kids Say the Darndest Things. She has lived and worked in Alaska, Mexico, Japan, Greenland, India,
Canada, Kenya, Nepal, Madagascar, and other geographies real and
imagined. Her academic training is in visual arts and cross-cultural
education; she's been an exhibiting artist (jewelry, photography,
drawing, and holography) and a teacher. Since falling into a job
in public radio in Fairbanks, Alaska, long ago, she has been committed
to sound, as an audio artist and as a journalist. She's received
many awards and fellowships—Peabody, Robert Wood Johnson,
National Endowment for the Arts, Corporation for Public Broadcasting,
National Federation of Community Broadcasters, the Japan Foundation,
and the Fulbright/Indo-U.S. Subcommission, among them.
Natasha Trethewey is author of Native Guard (Houghton Mifflin,
2006), Bellocq's Ophelia (Graywolf, 2002), and Domestic
Work (Graywolf, 2000). She is the recipient of fellowships
from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio
Study Center, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Bunting
Fellowship Program of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study
at Harvard. Her poems have appeared in such journals and anthologies
as American Poetry Review, Callaloo, Kenyon Review, The Southern
Review, New England Review, Gettysburg Review, and The Best American Poetry 2000 and 2003. An Associate Professor of
English and Creative Writing at Emory University, she is the Lehman
Brady Joint Chair Professor in Documentary Studies and American
Studies at Duke University and the University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill for 2005–06.
GALLERY Native Guard: On Memory,
Civil War History, and My South Natasha Trethewey: A Reading, Celebration,
and Book Signing |
Music by Caroline Herring and Band | March 2006
“Allan Gurganus writes without a safety net; no precautions
are taken against pathos, bathos, authorial indignity.” So
Henry Louis Gates Jr. observed in The Nation: “Gurganus
locates the dangerous glamour in ordinariness. He can do anything
he likes as a writer.”
BIOGRAPHY
Allan Gurganus is the author of the novel Oldest Living Confederate
Widow Tells All (Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy
of Arts and Letters), the collection of stories and novellas White
People (Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Pen Faulkner finalist),
and the novel Plays Well with Others (Lambda Literary Award
finalist). His latest work, The Practical Heart: Four Novellas, won the Lambda Literary Award. These novellas, written over the
past five years, have appeared in Granta and in Preservation
Magazine. The title work appeared as a Folio in Harper’s and won the National Magazine Prize. Two of the four works have
also been optioned for feature films, “The Practical Heart” by Alan Scott (Don’t Look Now), and “He’s
One, Too” by Thom Fitzgerald (The Hanging Garden).
Gurganus has taught at Stanford, Duke, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop,
and Sarah Lawrence. His short fiction is seen in the O’Henry
Prize Collection, Best American Stories Collection, and The
Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. The CBS version of “Widow”
won four Emmys, including Best Supporting Actress for Cecily Tyson.
A one-woman Broadway show based on “Widow” recently
starred Ellen Burstyn.
Returned from Manhattan to live in his native North Carolina, Gurganus
co-founded Writers Against Jesse Helms. His political editorials
often appear in The New York Times. He was recently inducted
into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Fellowship
of Southern Writers. Gurganus’s next novel is The Erotic
History of a Southern Baptist Church. As widely read abroad
as in his native country, Gurganus’s work has been translated
into sixteen languages.
John Cheever wrote, “I consider Allan Gurganus the most technically
gifted and morally responsive writer of his generation.”
GALLERY
COURSE
Gurganus’s course, Writing Fiction, Decoding American
History, is best described in his own words:
Even as we set down the stories that seem to us our most inward
and autobiographical, our very uniqueness springs from an encoded
cultural cargo we all unwittingly carry. This class involves telling
our own valued personal tales even as we trace—within them—those
national and historical traits we all embody. (We each work hard
to resist aspects of this wholesale inheritance. That resistance
is often The Story Itself). Where does our sacrosanct “I”
fit within the larger “Us”? How is today’s front-page
headline like or unlike our most private diaries? What barricades
must we build around the Subjective in order to protect it from
the flattening Normative? Aren’t we all actually that child
left behind? A Fiction Writing Class is meant to be protective of
its writers’ Personal Lives. Other courses are intent on charting
the national, historic sources that continually shape our expectations,
our very present-tense methodology. Whereas this class seeks to
fuse these two lines of inquiry. We will try investigating the schizophrenic
division between our nationalistic-religious biases and the most
secret of our inward suspicions. Confronting both, we can better
embrace a world that feels increasingly atomized and psychologically
compromising.
We will study those documents that hint at essential elements of
the American Self: from Locke to Franklin to Twain to Faulkner to
Toni Morrison to Soap Opera News. The class seeks to fuse
the creation of “personal” fiction with an exploration
of our collective inheritance via “public” documents,
emblematic autobiographies, group explanations. It hopes to do shuttle
diplomacy between our personal fears and our cultural norms. By
confronting this duality, by seeing the fertility it produces as
well as its resulting confusion, we are likelier to find new ways
of describing ourselves—private citizens daily laid bare by
a single battering global reality.
In a world where truth is ever harder to ascertain, fiction offers
a brilliant tool both for spin control and self-knowledge.
Our nation has always been excellent at talking about itself. Indeed,
we talked ourselves into being. Stories still matter here. Storytellers,
exaggerators, outlaw liars, slave owners in denial, snake-oil salesmen,
Bible floggers, innocents and angels dark and light, all comprise
the single tall tale America most loves to tell itself.
Our two textbooks (The Norton Anthology of Short Literature and The People Speak: American Voices, Some Famous, Some Little
Known, Howard Zinn) will participate in this fiction-documentary
split: one an anthology of exampled and admitted fictions, the other
a series of national documents and first-person spoken accounts.
By tracing our national myth—from Columbus’s ships log
through the journals of a Columbine shooter—we seek to find
our singular dwelling place along the cavalcade of our troubled,
glorious culture.
Since our national myth IS admittedly a myth, narrative inventors
have always ruled here. Is it not time for the creation of some
freshened American Myths? By simulating the voices of Founding Fathers,
by imitating carny-barkers, slaves, and slave-sellers—we can
each become a quorum out of Whitman. We will examine, through imitation,
Captivity Narratives, Slave Testimonies, POW Letters Home, the epic
self-inventions of exemplars as different as Benjamin Franklin,
P.T. Barnum, and Billie Holiday.
The National Narrative shows a willing eagerness to stretch the
truth: from Babe the Blue Ox to Twain’s Huck to confessions
of self-made industrialist-showmen, to star biographies and self-help
texts. Certain themes in our literature remain constant. We evince
a preference for the large over the small; we profess the gospel
of inclusion while often practicing its opposite; we demand the
very hype we most disparage.
Students will write their own tales. Some of these will be ventriloquized
in the manner of great American novelists, criminals, presidents.
The documentary impulse will be conjoined and complicated by that
of personal subject matter. Essential equipment: The willingness
to experiment, an embrace of the subjective, a good ear and willing
heart, the eagerness to laugh at oneself in advance of laughing
at others. These very qualities should fit you for the course. They
should also help you survive the circus crucible of being an aware
American in 2004.
Photograph of Allan Gurganus by Becket Logan, New York.
John
Cohen
Spring 2004
The recent joint releases of powerHouse Books’ There
Is No Eye: John Cohen Photographs and Smithsonian Folkways’ CD There Is No Eye: Music For Photographs, recordings of musicians photographed by John Cohen, bring together
several threads of Cohen’s work over the past fifty years.
Although Cohen is best known as a musician, his photographs and
films have been recognized by museums, by galleries, and at film
festivals worldwide. His campaign for the recognition of traditional
roots/folk music has led to the production of fifteen films, hundreds
of photographs, and sound recordings. He has also made more than
twenty recordings with the New Lost City Ramblers, along with related
articles, liner notes, and interviews about music.
Cohen’s work crosses many disciplines and has been presented
at diverse venues: art museums, anthropology film festivals, ethnomusicology
conferences, visual anthropology classes, Appalachian studies courses,
the politics of poverty classes, and Andean music and textile exhibitions.
His photographs are in major museum collections and publications,
and his award-winning films have been shown on PBS and BBC and at
festivals worldwide. The sound recordings of the New Lost City Ramblers
have received several Grammy nominations and, along with his field
recordings, have influenced many musicians—including Bob Dylan,
Jerry Garcia, and Ry Cooder—and shaped the old time fiddle
music revival.
COURSE
Cohen’s course, Visual Documentary, used film and photography to look at the problems inherent in visual
documentation of cultural materials. Students considered issues
of objectivity, interpretation, political agendas, mass communication,
marketing, art worlds, and the commodification of just about everything.
With the camera eye as the tool at the center, the course examined
approaches to photography and documentary film as well as the history
of documentary. Issues of technology and techniques were considered
along with aesthetics, editing, sequencing, composition, and the
expressiveness of light and atmosphere as they affect content in
documentary work. Students viewed and conducted documentary projects
in photography/film/video, with a focus on North Carolina.
Photograph of John Cohen by Ed Grazda.
Randall
Kenan
Fall 2002–Spring 2003
Writer Randall Kenan—who spent eight years traveling the United
States and gathering more than two hundred interviews to prepare
for his book Walking on Water, Black
American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century—is
one of America’s finest fiction writers and commentators.
Born in Brooklyn, New York, he spent his childhood in Chinquapin,
North Carolina, and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in
English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His
first novel, A Visitation of Spirits, was published in 1989, when he was twenty-six. Let
the Dead Bury Their Dead, a collection of short stories published
in 1992, was nominated for the Los
Angeles Times Book Award for fiction, was a finalist for
the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was among The
New York Times Notable Books of 1992.
In Walking on Water, Kenan
takes the reader inside the vast African American landscape to discuss
such matters as what it means to be black, whether or not there
is a black community, how to integrate, and, ultimately, what it
means to be a human being. For the book, he spoke with an Air Force
major whose father was lynched, an octogenarian farm woman, a church
janitor, an ex-gang member in Los Angeles, a twelve-year-old girl
in a racist classroom, a Republican congressman from Alaska, a vocal
welfare mother, a gay AIDS activist, and a Baptist minister in Mormon
Utah, among many others.
Kenan is also the author of a young adult biography of James Baldwin
(1993), and he wrote the text for Norman Mauskoff’s book of
photographs, A Time Not Here: The
Mississippi Delta (1997). A frequent reviewer for The
Nation, he has written for Spin,
The New York Times Book Review, Callaloo, Emerge, and other
publications.
COURSES
In fall 2002 Kenan taught American Voices:
Capturing Speech, Memory, and Culture, a seminar that focused
on various modes of written reportage and oral history using a two-pronged
approach. Students studied numerous texts, from historical narratives
to popular contemporary oral history and reportage, and they researched
and developed their own written documentary projects. In spring
2003 Kenan’s students in Modes
of Documentary Writing explored various modes of nonfiction
writing applied to representing actual experience, or what has been
called Immersion Journalism. Unlike conventional journalism, this
course focused on admittedly subjective modes of representation,
and students actively discussed the relationship between author
and subject. Through reading and discussion the students examined
ideas and problems, such as an author’s persona in the work,
the concept of “facts,” and the ongoing debate over
subjectivity versus objectivity in nonfiction writing. Another goal
of the course was to equip the student writer with a better understanding
and approach to fundamental techniques of narrative nonfiction writing:
character development, point-of-view, dialogue, language, narrative
structure and organization, tone, and focus.
Deborah
Willis
Fall 2000–Spring 2001
Deborah Willis, an internationally acclaimed artist, historian of
photography, and curator, won a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship
in 2000, the same year she began her Lehman Brady Professorship.
For more than twenty years Willis has been a leading scholar in
the investigation and recovery of the rich legacy of African American
photography. An accomplished photographer herself, she brings an
artist’s sensibility to her scholarly and curatorial work.
Her publications on two centuries of black photography have formed
the bedrock of scholarly work in this field.
Exhibitions of her work include Regarding
Beauty, University of Wisconsin (2003); Embracing
Eatonville, Light Works, Syracuse, New York (2003-04); HairStories, Scottsdale Contemporary Art Museum, Scottsdale, Arizona (2003-04); The Comforts of Home, Hand
Workshop Art Center, Richmond, Virginia (1999); Re/Righting
History: Counternarratives by Contemporary African American Artists, Katonah Museum of Art (1999); Memorable
Histories and Historic Memories, Bowdoin College Museum of
Art (1998); and Cultural Baggage, Rice University (1995).
Recent notable projects include The
Black Female Body: A Photographic History (with Carla Williams),
Temple University Press (2002); A
Small Nation of People: W.E.B. DuBois and the Photographs from the
Paris Exposition, Amistad Press (2003); and Reflections
in Black: A History of Black Photographers, 1840 to the Present, W.W. Norton (2000).
Willis’s awards and fellowships include the International
Center for Photography Infinity Award for Writing in Photography
and the Golden Light Photography Book of the Year award. Her other
books include Visual Journal: Photography
in Harlem and D.C. in the Thirties and Forties, Smithsonian
Institution Press (1996); Picturing
Us: African American Identity in Photography, The New Press
(1994); and VanDerZee: The Portraits
of James VanDerZee, Harry Abrams Publishing (1993). She is
now a professor of photography at the Tisch School of the Arts at
New York University.
COURSES
During the fall semester Willis taught Visualizing
Culture, a course exploring the range of ideas and methods
used by artists, historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and
critical thinkers in addressing visual culture. The course combined
historical and theoretical approaches and addressed the problematic
construction of art and vernacular images. During the spring, Willis
taught a studio course in which
students pursued photography, book art, painting, or other forms
of visual art, within the context of Willis’s emphasis in
the course on issues of representation, identity, and social history.
Bill
C. Malone
Spring 2000
Historian Bill C. Malone, a retired professor emeritus at Tulane
University who is known for his groundbreaking cultural studies
of Southern folk and country music, was the inaugural Lehman Brady
Chair Professor. Malone, recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship
for the study of country music and the Southern working class, has
published widely. His most recent book is Don’t
Get Above Your Raisin’: Country Music and the Southern Working
Class, University of Illinois Press (2002).
Malone’s other books include Country
Music U.S.A., Stars of Country Music (co-edited with Judith
McCulloh), and Southern Music/American
Music. He produced and annotated the Smithsonian
Collection of Classic Country Music, and he has authored
numerous journal and encyclopedia articles. A popular panelist,
lecturer, and teacher, Malone delivered the Thirty-Fourth Annual
Mercer University Lamar Memorial Lectures, “Romance, Realism,
and the Musical Culture of the Southern Plain Folk,” published
in 1993 as Singing Cowboys and Musical
Mountaineers by University of Georgia Press. He resides in
Madison, Wisconsin, where his wife pursues her work in history and
education.
COURSE
Malone taught a course titled Women and
Country Music, a seminar exploring the contributions made
by women in shaping the music of the South, from folk origins through
the era of commercialization in the twentieth century. The course
not only delved into women’s roles as music makers, but it
also investigated the ways in which women defined their lives and
communicated their feelings and values through music.
banner image:
John Cohen, far right, performing at a reception held in his honor
as the Lehman Brady Visiting Joint Chair Professor in Documentary
Studies and American Studies for the spring semester 2004. Also,
performing, from left, Amy Lewis, Joe Newberry, and Alice Gerrard.
Photograph by Christopher Sims.
