Robert O'Meally
Zora Neale Hurston Professor of English and Comparative Literature
My Contact Info
611 Philosophy, Mail Code: 4930, United States Office Hours Fall 2022
On sabbatical 2022-23+1 212 851 1633
[email protected]
Robert O'Meally
Research Interests
19th- and 20th-Century American and African-American LiteratureFilm, Media, and Visual Studies
African American and African Diaspora
Literature and Music/ Jazz Studies
Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies
Painting
Photography
American and the Americas
Ethnicity, Race, and Indigenous Studies
Biography
Robert G. O’Meally is the Zora Neale Hurston Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he has served on the faculty for twenty-five years. The founder and director of Columbia’s Center for Jazz Studies, O'Meally is the author of?The Craft of Ralph Ellison, Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday, The Jazz Singers,?and?Romare Bearden: A Black Odyssey. His edited volumes include?The Jazz Cadence of American Culture, Living With Music: Ralph Ellison’s Essays on Jazz, History and Memory in African American Culture, The Norton Anthology of African American Literature?(co-editor), and the Barnes and Noble editions of Mark Twain, Herman Melville, and Frederick Douglass. For his production of a Smithsonian record set called?The Jazz Singers,?he was nominated for a Grammy Award.O’Meally has co-curated exhibitions for The Smithsonian Institution, Jazz at Lincoln Center and The High Museum of Art (Atlanta). He has held Guggenheim and Cullman Fellowships, and was a recent fellow at Columbia's new Institute for Ideas and Imagination at the Global Center/Paris. His new books are?The Romare Bearden Reader?(edited for Duke University Press, 2019) and?Antagonistic Cooperation: Collage, Jazz, and American Fiction?(Columbia University Press, 2020).
For more information, please visit O'Meally's personal website here.