Cisco Bradley - Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies, Pratt Institute

This is Ashley Newby and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a series of conversations examining the history of the field. Our conversations engage with a wide range of activists and scholars - senior figures in the field, late doctoral students, and everyone in between, culture workers, and political organizers - in order to explore the cultural and political meaning of Black Studies as an area of inquiry and its critical methods.Today's conversation is with Cisco Bradley, who teaches in the Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies at Pratt Institute. He an award-winning author, film director, and screenwriter. He is a scholar of the social, cultural, and intellectual history of the African diaspora as well as a cultural theorist and historical ethnographer. Since 2011, his work has focused on music and migration, particularly as it has manifested in the United States. His current research focuses on tracing the oral transmission of African music in North America and the Caribbean from the 16th century to the present. His work has been widely reviewed in scholarly journals, the LA Review of Books, The Wire, and other publications. He has been awarded the Digital Studies Fellowship at the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress, a literary grant from the New York State Council of the Arts, the Charlotte W. Newcombe Fellowship from the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, and a dissertation fellowship from the Fulbright Program.He is the director of the Music and Migration Lab at the Pratt Institute. The lab is composed of an international team of researchers who work at the intersection between migration/mobility studies and music studies. Together with partners at New York University, Rutgers University, City University of New York, University of Geneva, University of Birmingham, University of Sydney, Griffith University, independent scholars, and musicians, the lab collects and preserves oral histories and leads mapping projects related to national and global cultural movements. The lab has recorded over 500 oral history interviews with more ongoing. Some of the interviews appear on Jazz Right Now which Prof. Bradley founded in 2013.