The Armstrong Continuum 2021 Meeting is seeking graduate student papers for a panel devoted to new work based on archival and scholarly research looking at the music, performances, and legacies of Louis Armstrong being done by graduate students across the globe. The Armstrong Continuum will be hosted by Robert G. O’Meally and the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University and is sponsored by the Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation. This meeting of the Armstrong Continuum will be themed around Time and Rhythm and welcomes proposals from all fields – from the humanities to the sciences – related to thinking about Armstrong’s work in relation to these themes. Other themes we encourage proposals to engage with, following a year of redoubled effort from organizations like Black Lives Matter to address state sanctioned violence and racism, are:

Issues of monuments and monumentalism
Armstrong and his music as an agent of social change in a time of political urgency
Time from the point of view of science and philosophy
Armstrong and critical race studies
Armstrong and feminist criticism

The Armstrong Continuum will take place on April 8-9, 2021. Preparations are currently underway to hold the event in person or online, depending on the circumstances necessitated by the Coronavirus pandemic.

Abstracts should be 200 words in length. Please email abstracts to a.c.valin -at- columbia.edu by December 31st.