Glenn Jordan is Reader in Cultural Studies in the Cardiff School of Creative and Cultural Industries, University of Glamorgan where he teaches cultural theory, cultural policy and photography, He is also founder and director of Butetown History & Arts Centre in Cardiff docklands (www.bhac.org).  Although Glenn Jordan has lived in Cardiff since 1987, he was born and raised in California - where he was a political activist by age 12 or 13 and actively participated in the Black power, Black studies and anti-war movements of the 1960s and 70s. He did his undergraduate degree at Stanford University (1970-74), studying African & Afro-American studies and psychology.  His postgraduate education was at Stanford University (1974-77), where he studied anthropology and social theory with St Claire Drake (on whom he will speak at the conference); and at the University of Illinois (1983-86), where he studied anthropology, sociology and cultural theory.  Glenn Jordan is the author of Reading  St. Clair Drake: A Methodological Essay with a Focus on Black Metropolis (Urbana-Champaign, Illinois: Afro-American Studies & Research Program, University of Illinois, 1982) and co-author, with C. Weedon, of  Cultural Politics: Class, Gender, Race and the Postmodern World (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1995). He is also a photographer and curator, whose work includes Somali Elders: Portraits from Wales (Cardiff: Butetown History & Arts Centre, 2004). 

 

   Professor Werner Sollors earned the Dr. Phil. degree at the Freie Universitat Berlin in 1975 and taught at Berlin, at Columbia University, and at the Universita degli Studi di Venezia. He joined the Harvard faculty in 1983 and holds the Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Chair as Professor of English and Professor of African American Studies.  His major publications include Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Literature and Culture (1986), Neither Black Nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature (1997), and a book-length contribution on "Ethnic Modernism" volume 6 of Sacvan Bercovitch's Cambridge History of American Literature (2003).  He published essays on Olaudah Equiano, Mark Twain, W. E. B. Du Bois, Charles Chesnutt, Mary Antin, Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, Henry Roth, Richard Wright, Ed Bullins, Adrienne Kennedy, Amiri Baraka, and Charles Johnson. Among his edited books are Frank J. Webb: Fiction, Essays, Poetry (2005) and An Anthology of Interracial Literature: Black-White Contacts in the Old World and the New (2004).

 

  Dr Jeffrey C. Stewart is currently Professor of History and Art History at George Mason University, and Associate Fellow of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University. He holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University. He was a Fulbright Lecturer in American Intellectual History at the University of Rome III in 2003. In addition to authoring numerous books, articles, and essays, Dr. Stewart curated a national touring exhibition, 'Paul Robeson: Artist and Citizen', for Rutgers University in 1998, and edited the accompanying catalogue. That exhibit and catalogue engaged questions of racial, gender, and political representation in the photography, film, music, and human rights history of Paul Robeson. 

 MUSIC

  Jean-Paul Bourelly is a world renowned guitarist whose music reflects the conference's transatlantic perspective.  Born on the 23rd November,1960, in Chicago, his parents were first-generation immigrants from Haiti. In growing up in Chicago he got to know Yoruba music from his grandmother, while also soaking up blues from Muddy Waters. Given singing lessons, he sang Rossini at the age of 10 in the Lyric Opera House. He had piano and drum lessons with Von Freeman. On hearing Jimi Hendrix in 1974, he at once changed instruments and took guitar lessons. In 1979 he moved to New York and got work with Chico Hamilton. There followed performances with Muhal Richard Abrams, Roy Haynes, Elvin Jones, Mc Coy Tyner and Pharaoh Sanders. In 1989 Miles Davis hired him for the album Amandla. Since the start of the 90s Jean-Paul Bourelly has been living in Berlin and has launched a series of projects which he has presented at various festivals. In so doing he has played with musicians like Vernon Reid, Mark Ribot, David Torn and Elliot Sharp. In 1996 he founded African Boom Bop, to which belong also the Senegalese singer, griot and drummer Abdourahmane Diop and the percussionist Mino Cinelu. Bourelly has also found time to play with the Blue Wave Bandit. In 1999 he started the Backroom project in the Berlin House of World Cultures 

 

 

Rhiannon Giddens. From the Carolina piedmont, Rhiannon Giddens grew up with the sounds of bluegrass from one side of her family and classic blues and jazz records on the other. After graduating the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, she became interested in the Gaelic world and starting learning Scots-Gaelic and Scottish fiddle; she won the NC Mod at Grandfather Mountain in 2004. Concurrently she began her study of African American string band music and started playing with The Carolina Chocolate Drops, who are under the tutelage of 88-year-old African American fiddler Joe Thompson and other elders of the community. As a mixed race Southerner her passion is exploring the blending of cultures through her Celtic band, her string band and her solo work. This passion has taken her to festivals around the United States, Canada and even on the isle of Lewis!