In August 2015 I graduated from Emory University’s Graduate Institute of the Liberal Arts with a PhD after my dissertation, “Folklore’s Filter: Race, Place, and Sacred Harp Singing,” was accepted by the graduate school. On September 1 I began an exciting new position as Post-doctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities Publishing at the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship.
My dissertation examines the impact of folklorization on Sacred Harp’s associations with race and place. I trace this through the tunebook’s twentieth-century editions and interactions between singers, folklorists, and folk festival audiences. Emory’s electronic theses and dissertations repository features the dissertation’s abstract and table of contents.
In my post-doctoral fellowship I will edit a digital critical edition of Joseph Stephen James’s 1911 Original Sacred Harp, a companion to the Centennial Edition I edited published by Pitts Theology Library and the Sacred Harp Publishing Company this February. The digital edition will use Readux, a tool for annotating and publishing digital critical editions developed by a team from Emory’s Center for Digital Scholarship and the library’s software development team with which I’ve served as annotation and export consultant. My digital critical edition will be the first volume in a series I’m editing using the platform tentatively titled Race and Religion in Turn of the Twentieth-century American Music. In addition to this project, I will teach a class each spring and will continue to pursue my writing and research. I’m happy to have completed my doctoral program and am thrilled to begin this new stage of my career.
Congratulations, Jesse; or, more appropriately, Dr. Karlsberg! Seeing the abstract and table of contents of your dissertation really whets my appetite. I look forward to seeing your work in its entirety.
that makes two of us!
Thanks to Wade, Steve, and others who have gotten in touch for their interest in my dissertation. I am happy to share the document with anybody who would like to read it, and would appreciate any comments. If you’d like a copy, please send me an email or get in touch through this site’s contact page.
I’d love to read your thesis too. I was hoping you might be publishing it. I’m a long time singer in California with interests in southern folk music, ballads, songs, and history.
Thanks, Mimi, for your interest as well. Happy to share my dissertation. It’s atypical for a dissertation to be published as is, but I am working on a book that builds on my dissertation research and expands it in several directions.