Music Studies Colloquium Featuring Award Winning Scholar Dr. Benjamin Barson

You are warmly invited to attend our next installation of the Music Studies Colloquium featuring speaker Dr. Benjamin Barson, who will present on his award winning book, “Brassroots Democracy: Maroon Ecologies and the Jazz Commons.”

Talk Abstract:

This talk will take my recent book Brassroots Democracy: Maroon Ecologies and the Jazz Commons. As a point of departure to discuss a central animating theme of the book rooted in political economy and human geography. I trace the structural importance and endurance of the plantation complex in the Caribbean and the U.S. South and especially those labor camps marked by the destructive and ecocidal properties of sugar production. I then consider how Black Atlantic music enunciated a counterpoint to these ecologies that challenged the plantation’s organization of land, labor, and social life. From the Haitian Revolution through Reconstruction and the emergence of early jazz, I argue that music did more than register struggles against racial capitalism: it helped produce alternative social and ecological relationships—what I call the jazz commons.

Speaker Bio:
Benjamin Barson is a composer, historian, and musicologist. He is the Samuel L. Williams Endowed Assistant Professor of Music at Bucknell University. His book Brassroots Democracy: Maroon Ecologies and the Jazz Commons (Wesleyan University Press, 2024), is the recipient of several honors, including the 2025 Robert M. Stevenson Award, presented by the American Musicological Society. Barson received his PhD in Music from the University of Pittsburgh, completed a Fulbright Garcia-Robles postdoctoral fellowship at the UABC in Mexicali, Mexico, and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Cornell University’s Africana Studies & Research Center. As a baritone saxophonist, Barson has performed with luminaries including Fred Ho, Arturo O’Farrill, Craig Harris, and Geri Allen, and at a wide range of national and international venues, including the Kennedy Center, the Guggenheim Museum, CECUT in Tijuana, and the Mesopotamian Water Forum – an event organized by ecological activists in northern Iraq’s Kurdistan. He is the winner of the 2018 Johnny Mandel Prize from ASCAP for his composition “Insurrealista.” Barson is also an activist, and was a cultural organizer in the campaign to free political prisoner and Black power activist Russell Maroon Shoatz.

Brassroots Democracy book prizes and distinctions:

– Robert M. Stevenson Award (2025): Won from the American Musicological Society for hemispheric music scholarship.
– Nicolás Cristóbal Guillén Batista Outstanding Book Award (2026): Received from the Caribbean Philosophical Association for cross-disciplinary work.
– Barry and Claire Brook Award: Presented by the CUNY Graduate Center’s Barry Brook Center.
– MAAH Stone Book Award (2025): Named a finalist by the Museum of African American History.
– Portia K. Maultsby Prize (2026): Honorable mentions from the Society for Ethnomusicology
– Woody Guthrie Book Award (2026) Honorable Mention for the IASPM-US