Richard Ings is a freelance writer and researcher in the arts, with an MA in Chinese studies (Cambridge) and an MA and a PhD, both in American studies (Nottingham), where his research thesis was Making Harlem Visible: Race, Photography and the American City 1915–1955. He has published essays and reviews on American photography, and lectured widely on visual culture and American realist art. His numerous arts publications include From the Favela to Our Manor: Translating AfroReggae (Queen Mary, University of London); Connecting Flights: Debating Globalisation, Diaspora and the Arts (British Council), and Making Radiowaves: Internet Radio and the Creative School (Cape UK).
Richard H. King is Professor Emeritus in American Intellectual History at the University of Nottingham. He is the author of A Southern Renaissance, of Civil Rights and the Idea of Freedom (both Oxford University Press), and, most recently, of Race, Culture and the Intellectuals, 1940–1970 (Wilson Center/Johns Hopkins University Press).
Graham Lock is a freelance writer and editor with special interests in music and African American culture. From 2001 to 2004 he was a Senior Research Fellow in the School of American and Canadian Studies at Nottingham University, working on the Criss Cross project. His books include Blutopia: Visions of the Future and Revisions of the Past in the Work of Sun Ra, Duke Ellington, and Anthony Braxton (Duke University Press), Chasing the Vibration: Meetings with Creative Musicians (Stride), and Forces in Motion: Anthony Braxton and the Meta-reality of Creative Music (Quartet). He is the author of numerous articles and liner notes and is co-editor, with David Murray, of Thriving on a Riff: Jazz & Blues Influences in African American Literature and Film (Oxford University Press).
David Murray is Professor of American Studies at the University of Nottingham and was director of the Criss Cross research project. He has published widely on American Indians, including Indian Giving: Economies of Power in Early Indian-White Exchanges (University of Massachusetts Press) and Forked Tongues: Speech, Writing, and Representation in North American Indian Texts (Indiana University Press), as well as on American poetry and cultural studies. His latest book is Matter, Magic, and Spirit: Representing Indian and African American Belief (University of Pennsylvania Press). He is co-editor, with Graham Lock, of Thriving on a Riff: Jazz & Blues Influences in African American Literature and Film (Oxford University Press).
Paul Oliver has published articles and record sleeve notes since the early 1950s, and first conducted extensive fieldwork on the blues in 1960. His books include Blues Fell This Morning: Meaning in the Blues, Conversation with the Blues, Savannah Syncopators: African Retentions in the Blues (republished as part of Yonder Come the Blues), Songsters and Saints (all Cambridge University Press), and The Story of the Blues (Northeastern University Press), among many others. He has also published several books on vernacular architecture and a three-volume world encyclopedia of the subject. A book of his radio scripts, Broadcasting the Blues: Black Blues in the Segregation Era, was published by Routledge.
Robert G. O’Meally is Zora Neale Hurston Professor of Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he has also been Director of the Center for Jazz Studies. His numerous publications include Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday (Arcade) and The Craft of Ralph Ellison (Harvard University Press). He is the editor of The Jazz Cadence of American Culture (Columbia University Press) and Living with Music: Ralph Ellison’s Jazz Writings (Modern Library); and co-editor of Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies (Columbia University Press) and History and Memory in African American Culture (Oxford University Press).
Robert Farris Thompson is Col. John Trumbell Professor of the History of Art and Master of Timothy Dwight College at Yale. He has organized several major exhibitions, notably the Four Moments of the Sun (1981) and the Face of the Gods: Shrines and Altars of the Black Atlantic World (1985) at the National Gallery of Art. His numerous books and exhibition catalogues include African Art and Motion (National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC), Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (Vintage), and, with Georges Meurant, Mbuti Design: Paintings by Pygmy Women from the Ituri Forest (Thames & Hudson). His latest work is Tango: The Art History of Love (Pantheon).
Johannes Völz is an assistant professor in the Department of Culture of the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at the Free University Berlin. He has published on jazz, contemporary transatlantic visual culture, and the American renaissance in such journals as Critical Studies in Improvisation, Comparative American Studies, and Amerikastudien/American Studies. He also writes as a freelance music critic for the Berlin daily newspaper Der Tagesspiegel as well as for the magazine Jazz thing.
Sara Wood is a lecturer in American studies at the University of Birmingham. Her primary research areas concern twentieth-century African American art and literature, focusing on the relationships between music and other art forms, including photography, fine art, and poetry. She is currently working on a book on African American art and is coordinator of the Discover American Studies project.