Brent Hayes Edwards

Brent Hayes Edwards is Peng Family professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University, where he is affiliated with the Center for Jazz Studies. He also serves as director of the Scholars-in-Residence Program at New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Edwards’ publications include The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (2003), the co-edited collection Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies (2004), and scholarly editions of classic works by W. E. B. Du Bois, Frederick Douglass, Joseph Conrad, and Claude McKay. His most recent books are his translation of Michel Leiris’ monumental 1934 Phantom Africa (2017) and Edwards’ own Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination (2017), which was awarded the 2018 ASCAP Foundation Virgil Thomson Award for Music Criticism and the 2019 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism. Current projects include helping composer Henry Threadgill write his autobiography. A 2015 Guggenheim Fellow, Edwards was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2020. He served as a Center panelist for Performance in 2020, as a Performance LOI panelist in 2017, and as a panelist for Dance from 2000-2007.