Benjamin Cawthra, Ph.D.

Associate Professor
Department of History

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Teaching interests: Twentieth-century U.S. cultural history, visual history, public history, the Civil War era.

Research interests:Jazz cultural studies, visual history, African American history and culture.

Brief biography: Benjamin Cawthra earned the Ph.D. at Washington University in St. Louis. His research examines the relationships among history, visual and musical cultures, and race. His book Blue Notes in Black and White: Photography and Jazz (University of Chicago Press, 2011) examines the photography of jazz subjects from swing era of the 1930s to the era of 1960s black nationalism. As a public historian at the Missouri History Museum in St. Louis, he curated several exhibitions, including Miles: A Miles Davis Retrospective in 2001. He also curated the jazz-themed exhibition Herb Snitzer: Photographs from the Last Years of Metronome for the Sheldon Art Galleries in St. Louis in 2008. He is an associate director of the Center for Oral and Public History and was project director of Farmers to Flyers: MCAS El Toro and Mid-century Orange County (2009) and New Birth of Freedom: Civil War to Civil Rights in California (2011), exhibitions at the Orange Country Nikkei and Agricultural Heritage Museum.

Dr. Cawthra received the Henry Luce Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies Dissertation Fellowship in American Art and the Morroe Berger-Benny Carter Research Fellowship at the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University-Newark among other awards. He joined the CSUF history department in 2007.