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 soul music and culture, as well as on a book project about Germanness, Jewishness, the documents (papers) that purport to give us an Identity, and issues of memory and forgetting. My articles on women and popular music have been widely reprinted and taught.

Books:

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.