Benjamin Cawthra, Ph.D.

Biography

Benjamin Cawthra is a U.S. cultural and public historian. His book Blue Notes in Black and White: Photography and Jazz (University of Chicago Press, 2011) examines the evolving representation of jazz subjects from the swing era of the 1930s to the black nationalist 1960s. He has also published recent essays on musician Duke Ellington (2016) and boxer Jack Johnson (2019). He is an associate director of the Lawrence de Graaf Center for Oral and Public History and has directed several history exhibitions for the Center, including New Birth of Freedom: Civil War to Civil Rights in California (2011) and Keystone Korner: Portrait of a Jazz Club featuring the photography of Kathy Sloane (2015). He also curated and wrote the catalog for Herb Snitzer: Photographs from the Last Years of Metronome (Sheldon Art Galleries, 2008).

As a public historian at the Missouri History Museum in St. Louis, he curated, among other exhibitions, Miles: A Miles Davis Retrospective (2001). He later served as an on-camera consultant for the documentary Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool (Stanley Nelson, 2019). He received the Henry Luce Foundation/American Council of Learned Societies Dissertation Fellowship in American Art among other awards. He has led several tours to Italy in the CSUF College of Humanities and Social Sciences Study Abroad program. A native of Washington state, Dr. Cawthra enjoys photography,  literary fiction, live music, theater, and classic and independent film. He maintains a blog at www.bluenotesinblackandwhite.com.