Benjamin Barson

Benjamin Barson is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Cornell University, affiliated with the Society for the Humanities and the Africana Studies and Research Center. A composer, historian, and musicologist, his work examines jazz as an Afro-Atlantic art form connected to the Haitian Revolution and Radical Reconstruction.

• PhD in Music from the University of Pittsburgh
• Completed Fulbright Garcia-Robles Postdoctoral Fellowship at Universidad Autónoma de Baja California

Research Interests focus on colonial social relations, afrodiasporic resistance, and cultural ecologies. His current monograph, Brassroots Democracy: Maroon Ecologies and the Jazz Commons, investigates 19th-century Black grassroots democratic practices through brass band music in post-Civil War Louisiana.

Publications include studies on Chinese indentured labor in the US South and Haitian migrant influences in Louisianan blues. His musical compositions engage with revolutionary jazz traditions and collaborate with Global South activists.

• Awards: 2018 Johnny Mandel Prize (ASCAP Foundation)
• Fellowships: Fulbright Garcia-Robles

Barson integrates interdisciplinary methodologies from Africana studies, musicology, and Atlantic history, emphasizing aesthetics, colonialism, and liberation theologies in his teaching and scholarship.