Jazz banjo virtuoso Don Vappie is descended from a long line of New Orleans musicians. Once a featured performer in the Preservation Hall Band, Vappie now leads and tours with the Creole Jazz Serenaders (CJS). He co-founded, with his wife Milly, "Bring it on Home," an organized effort to help displaced New Orleans musicians find work and return to their hometown. His family's musical heritage was recently explored in American Creole: New Orleans Reunion, a PBS documentary. As a result, he was honored with a LA Creole Society Award for his promotion of the Creole culture of New Orleans in music and film.

Vappie's recent recordings with the CJS include Banjo A La Creole and Swing Out. With the Creole Jazz Serenaders, Don's music incorporates the musical legacy of the New Orleans Creole culture, a society that sprang from the mixture of French, Spanish, African, and American Indian people with strong ties to the Caribbean Islands. OffBeat magazine chose his debut CD with the CJS, Creole Blues, as one of Louisiana's 100 Essential CDs of the 20th century.

With Otis Taylor, it's best to expect the unexpected. But it is precisely this element of surprise that makes him one of the most compelling artists to emerge in recent years. Guitar Player proclaimed him "arguably the most relevant blues artist of our time," while Billboard has called him "one of the most innovative, thought-provoking blues artists to emerge in the last 20 years."

Truth and history are at the heart of Recapturing the Banjo, Taylor's fifth release on Telarc. The album explores the deepest roots of the banjo—an instrument that, despite its common associations with American folk and bluegrass, actually originated in Africa and made its way to the fledgling American colonies in the 1700s via the influx of African slaves.

Cecelia Conway is professor of English and Folklore at Appalachian State University. Her scholarly interests include the banjo, fiddle and other music traditions, women and literature in the South and Appalachian literature. Dr. Conway published African Banjo Echoes in Appalachia (1995) and co-produced the Smithsonian CD, Black Banjo Songsters of NC and VA. Atlantic Monthly considered her book a "landmark study" and the CD a "rare collection" of music. She is currently working on a video about the 2005 Black Banjo Gathering, which she helped organize.

Laurent Dubois is professor of French and history at Duke University. His research interests are focused on the culture and history of the Caribbean and he has written extensively on the life and history of the region. His book, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787-1804 (2004) received the Atlantic History Prize and the John H. Fagg Prize for the best book on Spain, Portugal, and Latin America, both from the American Historical Association, as well as awards from the GilderLehrman Center and the Society for French Historical Studies. Published in the same year, his Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution was honored as one of the best nonfiction books of 2004 by the Los Angeles Times and Christian Science Monitor. He has recently completed Scoring Spirits: The Empire of French Soccer (forthcoming from University of California Press), and is working on "The Banjo: A Cultural History" as a Fellow at the National Humanities Center, a project for which he also received a Guggenheim Fellowship this year.

Michael Wood is the Charles Barnwell Straut Professor of English and Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University. He has written on a wide range of topics, including volumes on Luis Buñuel, Franz Kafka and Gabriel García Márquez, as well as The Magician's Doubts, a study of Nabokov, and The Road to Delphi, a study of the ancient and continuing allure of oracles. Among his other titles are America in the Movies, Children of Silence, concerning contemporary fiction, and most recently, Literature and the Taste of Knowledge. A member of the American Philosophical Society and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books. While at the Center, Wood is working on a book about Marcel Proust and the Dreyfus Affair.

Carol J. Clover is Class of 1936 Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Scandinavian at the University of California, Berkeley. Her scholarly interests and writing span a broad range of topics, from the history and culture of Early Northern Europe (Scandinavia, Anglo-Saxon England, northern Continent) to things like tap dance in the Hollywood musical and the complexity of gender politics in horror cinema. She has published numerous articles across her areas of academic interest and three books, including The Medieval Saga (1982); Old Norse-Icelandic Literature: A Critical Guide (with John Lindow, 1985); and Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (1992). While at the Center, she is working on a book on the relation between the Anglo-American trial and Anglo-American narrative entertainment ("The People's Plot: Trials, Movies, and the Adversarial Imagination") and the difference of American film practices from those of Continental Europe.

Nicolas Bock is teaching late medieval and early modern Art as an associate professor at the University of Lausanne (Switzerland). His first book, Kunst am Hofe der Anjou-Durazzo: Der Bildhauer Antonio Baboccio, 1351-1423 (2001), focused on the artistic patronage at the royal court of Naples and on the beginnings of Renaissance art in Southern Italy. An expert on European art of the Middle Ages, Bock has written numerous articles on political iconography and on the function of works of art in the religious and ceremonial context. While at the Center, Nicolas Bock is working on a project that examines how the act of titling works of art contributes not only to their reception but also to the methodologies employed in art-historical analysis.

Ruth Bernard Yeazell is Chace Family Professor of English at Yale University. Her research and teaching focus on the novel from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, the history of gender and sexuality, and recently on the relations of literature to the visual arts. The recipient of a number of fellowships, including from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, she has written extensively on a variety of literary topics, including for the wider public in the London Review of Books. Among her six books are The Death and Letters of Alice James (1981); Fictions of Modesty: Women and Courtship in the English Novel (1991); Harems of the Mind: Passages of Western Art and Literature (2000); and Art of the Everyday: Dutch Painting and the Realist Novel (2008). While at the Center, she is working on "A Short History and Theory of Picture Titles."

Parker Shipton is Associate Professor of Anthropology and Research Fellow in African Studies at Boston University. He has written extensively on the people of Africa, particularly on customs involving kinship, land tenure, money and exchange, and ritual. His books include Bitter Money: Cultural Economy and Some African Meanings of Forbidden Commodities (1989); The Nature of Entrustment: Intimacy, Exchange, and the Sacred in Africa (2007) for which he won the 2008 Melville J. Herskovits Award from the African Studies Association; and Mortgaging the Ancestors: Ideologies of Attachment in Africa. His volume Credit between Cultures: Farmers, Financiers, and Misunderstanding in Africa is forthcoming in 2009 from Yale University Press. For Blackwell Publishers, he has served as Series Editor of the Peoples of Africa series and is the Founding Editor of the Blackwell Anthologies in Social and Cultural Anthropology. He has served as researcher and adviser to several international aid agencies and is a former president of the Association for Africanist Anthropology. While at the National Humanities Center he is working on "Sequence and Circumstance: Order and Violation in East Africa."

This spring the National Humanities Center (NHC) co-hosts a new series of lecture at the North Carolina Museum of History. Sponsored by the North Carolina Museum of History Associates and NHC, these lectures will feature Center Fellows discussing the experience of being sold as a slave in the pre-Civil War South, the struggle of tenant farmers in the early twentieth century, and the history of the banjo. These lectures are presented free for members of the North Carolina Museum of History; $5 for non-members.

Thurs., February 19 — 7:00 p.m.
"Appraised, Bartered, and Sold: The Value of Human Chattels"
Daina Berry, Michigan State University

Thurs., March 12 — 7:00 p.m.
"Shattering White Solidarity: A History of the Southern Tenant Farmer's Union"
Elizabeth Payne, University of Mississippi

Thurs., April 2 — 7:00 p.m.
"The Banjo: A Cultural History"
Laurent Dubois, Duke University

Heather Williams is associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and was a 2007-08 Fellow at the National Humanities Center. This collection of her quilts spans her professional career and reflects both her intellectual and artistic interests.

Employing a variety of textiles and techniques, Williams's handmade quilts include both abstract and narrative subjects, many of them related to the history of African Americans in the South. As a scholar, Williams's book, Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom (2005), received several book awards, including the Lillian Smith Book Prize. She is currently completing a book on separation of African American families during the antebellum period and efforts to reunify families following emancipation. This project considers, among other things, the process of mourning or grieving after separation, methods for keeping track of family members over distance and time, African American marriage following the war, and the larger society's reception of the idea of legalizing black marriages.

The lectures and exhibits at the National Humanities Center are free and open to the public. They are supported by the North Carolina GlaxoSmithKline Educational and Cultural Outreach Endowment Fund.

For more information about Center events, please contact Martha Johnson by phone (919) 549-0661, ext. 110 or e-mail mjohnson@nationalhumanitiescenter.org.