Benjamin Cawthra, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor
Department of History

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Teaching interests: American cultural and public history, museums and memory, African American history and culture, history and visual culture, jazz cultural studies

Research interests: My current work, a manuscript called "Blue Notes in Black and White: Photography, Race, and the Image of Jazz," examines the construction of jazz performance as a site of African American genius via still photogaphy published in magazines and on record jackets during the civil rights era of the mid-twentieth century.  I am also curating an exhibition called Herb Snitzer: Jazz Photographs from the Last Days of Metronome for the Sheldon Art Galleries in St. Louis

Brief biography: I received my Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis after working as a public historian at the Missouri Historical Society for nearly a decade.  At MHS, I curated several exhibitions, including Miles: A Miles Davis Retrospective, the first large-scale museum exhibition on the jazz musician, and contributed an essay and interviews to an accompanying volume edited by Gerald Early, Miles Davis and American Cuture.  I also served as project manager for Lewis & Clark: The National Bicentennial Exhibition.  I am a recipient of the Henry Luce Foundation American Council of Learned Societies Dissertation Fellowship in American Art and have also been a Morroe Berger-Benny Carter Research Fellow at the Institute for Jazz Studies at Rutgers University-Newark.