Presented by
Africana Studies and the Graduate School Distinguished Scholar/Mentor Series
Cosponsored by the Center for the Humanities, Dean Blake, and the Graduate School
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Tracy Sharpley-Whiting
Distinguished Professor of African American and Diaspora Studies and French
Vanderbilt Unviersity
The Paris Transfer: African American Women in the City of Light Between the Two Great Wars
Tuesday
2-17-15
11:00 AM |
CAS Gallery
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Dr. Tracy D. Sharpley-Whiting's lecture will explore the period called the Jazz Age, when France became a place where an African American woman could realize personal freedom and creativity. While entering and exiting Paris at various moments, these women were participants in the life of the American expatriate colony, which included Man Ray, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and Cole Porter, among others, and they commingled with bohemian French avant-garde writers and artists like Picasso, Gide, Breton, Matisse, Bernard, Colette, Kiki, and Maillol. This talk, which concludes with a reading from The Autobiography of Ada "Bricktop" Smith, tells their stories and that moment in history of the city they encountered in words and images.
Tracy D. Sharpley-Whiting is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Distinguished Professor of French and African American and Diaspora Studies at Vanderbilt University where she also directs the Program in African American and Diaspora Studies. She has published thirteen monographs and edited volumes. She has recently completed a work of genre fiction entitled The Thirteen Fellow, an academic murder mystery.
