Music Department Colloquium: Irene V. Jackson-Brown PhD ’74—“‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’: A Conversation with a Gospel Music Research Pioneer”

Thursday, September 18, 2025 at 4:30pm
Adzenyah Rehearsal Hall 003

Free and open to the public.

Dr. Irene V. Jackson-Brown received her PhD in ethnomusicology from Wesleyan University in 1974 with her dissertation, Afro-American Gospel Music and its Social Setting: with Special Attention to Roberta Martin. She has carried out research on spirit possession and altered states of consciousness in Haiti and Jamaica, was an assistant professor at Yale University and Howard University and a Fellow at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, and is the Founder and CEO of Jackson-Brown Associates. In 1981 she published Lift Every Voice and Sing: A Collection of Afro-American Spirituals and Other Songs, a groundbreaking hymnal in the Episcopal Church. In 1985, she published twin pioneering edited collections that helped define the burgeoning field of African diasporic studies: More Than Dancing: Essays on Afro-American Music and Musicians; and More Than Drumming: Essays on African and Afro-Latin American Music and Musicians. She later founded the applied gerontology practice, The Art of Eldercare. We will have a conversation with Dr. Jackson-Brown about her extraordinary career informed by her graduate work at Wesleyan.

Find the full Fall 2025 Colloquium Series schedule here.