Author Discussion: Carmen in Diaspora by Jennifer Wilks

The discussion will be moderated by Carles Carson. A reception, book sales, and a signing will follow the program.

Jennifer M. Wilks is an associate professor of English, African and African Diaspora Studies, and Comparative Literature at the University of Texas at Austin, where she directs the John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies. Her latest book, Carmen in Diaspora: Adaptation, Race, and Opera's Most Famous Character (Oxford UP, 2024), is a cultural history of Carmen adaptations set in African diasporic contexts. Her previous monograph, Race, Gender, and Comparative Black Modernism: Suzanne Lacascade, Marita Bonner, Suzanne Césaire, Dorothy West (LSU P, 2008), explores the gendered legacies of the Harlem Renaissance and Negritude. Wilks’ essays have appeared in African-American Review, Callaloo, Comparative Literature Studies, Modern Fiction Studies, and Small Axe, and her French-to-English translation of the 19th-century French and Swiss diaries of activist Mary Church Terrell was published in Palimpsest. At UT, Wilks has been recognized at the department, college, and university levels for her teaching.

Charles Carson is a musicologist whose interests are African-American/American expressive cultures, Popular Music, Jazz, Film Music, and music and culture. A graduate of the Moores School of Music at the University of Houston, Charles is a former Howard Mayer Brown Fellow for the American Musicological Society. He received his PhD in Music History from the University of Pennsylvania, with a dissertation entitled "Broad and Market: At the Crossroads of Race and Class in Philadelphia Jazz, 1956-1980." He has presented and published in a number of venues, on topics ranging from theme park music to smooth jazz.

Please have your reservation confirmation ready upon entering. A reservation does not guarantee a seat. Line forms upon arrival of the first patron, and doors open 30 minutes before the event begins. No food or beverages are allowed inside our theater or gallery space.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

Get App

Host or Publisher Harry Ransom Center