Full-Time Faculty

Gayle Wald
Ph.D., Princeton University, 1995

My teaching and research interests include African American literature (in particular right now, the life and dramaturgy of Lorraine Hansberry), twentieth-century U.S. popular music, cultural theory, performance studies, and feminist and gender studies. I am currently working on a book for Duke University Press about the historic PBS television show Soul!, which aired between 1968 and 1973, and which was guided by programming visionary Ellis Haizlip. I am also at work on a long-term book project about Germanness, Jewishness, and issues of memory and forgetting. My articles on women and popular music have been widely reprinted and taught.

Books:

"It's Been Beautiful: Soul! and Black Power Television [tenative title] ( Durham, NC: Duke University Press, forthcoming 2011).

Shout, Sister, Shout! The Untold Story of Rock-and-Roll Trailblazer Sister Rosetta Tharpe ( Boston: Beacon Press, 2007).

Crossing the Line: Racial Passing in 20 th-Century U.S. Literature and Culture. New Americanists series. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000).

Other publications:

“Reviving Rosetta Tharpe: Performance and Memory in the 21 st Century,” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 16, 1 (March 2006): 91-106.

“Have a Little Talk: Listening to the B-side of History,” Popular Music 24, 3 (2005): 323-37. C ited as a "Notable Essay of 2005" in Da Capo Best Music Writing 2006: The Year's Finest Writing on Rock, Hip Hop, Jazz, Pop, Country, and More, ed. Mary Gaitskill and Daphne Carr (New York: Da Capo, 2006).

“From Spirituals to Swing: Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Gospel Crossover,” American Quarterly 55, 3 (September 2003): 387-416.

“`I Want It That Way’: Teenybopper Music and the Girling of Boy Bands.” Genders 35 (Spring 2001). <http://www.genders.org/g35/g35_wald.html>

 “Clueless in the Neocolonial World Order.” Camera Obscura: A Journal of Feminism and Film Theory, 42 (September 1999): 51-69.