Eileen Southern and the Music of Black Americans

A digital exhibit (PI Carol Oja) centered on Eileen Jackson Southern (1920–2002), whose 1971 book The Music of Black Americans established the academic field of Black music studies. The site draws from archival materials in Southern’s collection at Harvard University Archives — documenting her life as the first African American woman to earn tenure in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences (1976), her scholarship, and her confrontation of persistent racial and gender biases.

I built a custom Omeka theme with a timeline component to structure the exhibit’s narrative.