“…the first actor who has caused me to thank God for the talkies…” Stepin Fetchit and the Performance of “Black Sound”
When: April 22, 4:30 p.m.
Where: Film Forum, Schwartz Center
Miriam Petty is an assistant professor in the Department of Radio,Television + Film at Northwestern University. She has taught and lectured widely on film, African American literature, and Black popular culture. A 2006-2009 fellow of Princeton University’s Society of Fellows, her recent projects include Race.Place.Space., a documentary film festival in Trenton, New Jersey, that she curated on behalf of Princeton’s Center for African American Studies. She was also a Geraldine R. Dodge Fellow at Rutgers-Newark’s Institute on Ethnicity, Culture, and the Modern Experience, for which she developed and implemented Watching Carefully, a two-year city initiative geared toward the improvement of media literacy among adults and children. Her book Stealing the Show: African American Performers and Audiences in 1930s Hollywood (University of California Press), explores the complex relationships between black audiences and black performers in the classical Hollywood era. Petty’s courses include African American Stardom, Introduction to Film Noir, and The Authorship of Tyler Perry.
