The other half of the research agenda.

Hope began her academic life as a Classical Piano major at Northwestern. She still composes, performs, and records, and her scholarship on culture as influence treats the arts not as a hobby, but as method. Her current working paper, Music, Enslavement and Liberation in the Black Imagination, brings the two halves together.

Where it began

The keys came first.

Before the fieldwork, before the book, before three continents of research, there was a piano in Chicago. The instrument that taught her to listen for what a culture is really saying is the same one she still returns to.