Rashida Braggs Wins Berger-Carter Jazz Research Award

Rashida K. Braggs, assistant professor of Africana Studies, has received a grant from the Rutgers Institute of Jazz Studies (IJS) to continue her research on jazz. Braggs received the grant for her new research titled In the Shadow of Josephine: Migrating Jazz Women Negotiate Racial and National Identity.The $1,000 Morroe Berger-Benny Carter Jazz Research Fund grant will allow Braggs to research at IJS, which maintains one of the largest jazz archives and collections of audiovisual jazz materials in the world. With the award Braggs can advance her project investigating jazzwomen of color who migrate away from their homelands.

“I will use the Berger-Carter grant to research the lives of Inez Cavanaugh, Mary Lou Williams, Alberta Hunter, and Rhoda Scott, as well as continue to shape this project by adding more musicians, refining my research questions, and gleaning new directions to explore,” Braggs says.

The resources at IJS have already proved instrumental to Braggs’ book, Jazz Diasporas: Race, Music and Migration in Post-World War II Paris, forthcoming in January. The book explores the shift in perceptions of jazz as a black music to a global music, and it analyzes the migratory experiences, collaborations, and negotiations of identity of African American musicians residing in postwar France.

Since 1987, IJS has awarded annual grants of $1,000 to 10 scholars to fund research in jazz history. Half of the recipients are students of the Rutgers University-Newark Master’s Program in Jazz History and Research, and the other five are scholars from other institutions or unaffiliated researchers.

Braggs holds a Ph.D. in performance studies from Northwestern University, an M.S. in mass communications from Boston University, and a B.A. in English and theater studies from Yale University. She has held a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University and a visiting professorship at the University of Heidelberg in Germany, and she has published in such journals as Nottingham French Studies, The Journal of Popular Music Studies and The James Baldwin Review. At Williams, Braggs teaches courses including Thirteen Ways of Looking at Jazz, Groovin’ the Written Word: The Role of Music in African American Literature, and Black Migrations: African American Performance at Home and Abroad; on multiple occasions, she has drawn directly on her jazz research to inform her courses.

December 2, 2015