Christi Jay Wells

Books:

Between Beats: The Jazz Tradition and Black Vernacular Dance. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021.  (Received the Joanne Kealiinohomoku prize from the Society for Ethnomusicology - Dance, Movement, and Gesture Section. Finalist for the Dance Studies Association's De la Torre Bueno First Book Award and International Association for the Study of Popular Music - US's Woodie Guthrie Award.)

Editorial:

Guest editor for Americas: A Hemispheric Music Journal 31 (2002), special issue "Dance, Bodies, and Embodied Listening."

Journal articles:

"'Always Toss Bricks': Black Separatist Advocacy in Porter Roberts’ Columns for the Pittsburgh Courier, 1936-1939." The Musical Quarterly 107 (Spring-Summer, 2024): 9-33.

"'Gimme a Hell Yeah!': Stone Cold Steve Austin and the WWF’s Soundscapes of Rage." Journal of Popular Music Studies 35, no.4 (March 2023): 109-132.

"Embodied Listening and Structures of Power." Introduction to "Dance, Bodies, and Embodied Listening," edited by Christi Jay Wells and Susan Thomas, special issue, Americas: A Hemispheric Music Journal 31 (2022): vii-xii.

"'Spinnin’ the Webb': Representational Spaces, Mythic Narratives, and the 1937 Webb/Goodman Battle of Music." Journal of the Society for American Music 14, no. 2, (May 2020): 176–196.

"'You Can’t Dance to It': Jazz Music and Its Choreographies of Listening." Daedalus 148, no.2, special issue 'Jazz Still Matters," edited by Ingrid Monson and Gerald Early (Spring 2019): 36–51.

"'The Ace of his Race': Paul Whiteman’s Early Critical Reception in the Black Press." Jazz and Culture 1 (2018): 77–103.

"'A Dreadful Bit of Silliness': Feminine Frivolity and Ella Fitzgerald’s Early Critical Reception." Women and Music 21 (2017): 43–65. (Received the Irving Lowens Article Award from the Society for American Music)

Book Chapters

"'This Thing Might Turn Into Something': The Choreomusical Layers of Hellzapoppin'." With Rachel Short, in Choreomusicology: Dialogues in Music and Dance, edited by Samuel Dorf and Helen Julia Minors, 264-282. New York: Routledge, 2025.

"Paul Whiteman, Cultural Ownership, and Jazz Historiography in Dave Peyton’s ‘The Musical Bunch.'" In Beyond the Bandstand: Paul Whiteman in American Musical Culture, edited by W. Anthony Sheppard, 45-66. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2024.

"Forbidden Movements and Degenerate Bodies: Personal Reflections on Black Social Dance and Jewish Resistance." In The Oxford Handbook of Jewishness and Dance, edited by Naomi Jackson, Tony Shapiro-Phim, and Rebecca Pappas, 374-383. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021.

"Playing with the Beat: Choreomusical Improvisation in Rhythm Tap Dance." With Alison Robbins, in The Oxford Handbook of Improvisation in Dance, edited by Vida L. Migdelow, 719-734. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.

"'And I Make My Own': Class Performance, Black Urban Identity, and Depression-Era Harlem’s Physical Culture." In The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Ethnicity, edited by Anthony Shay and Barbara Sellars Young, 17-40. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.

Dissertation:

"'Go Harlem!': Chick Webb and his Dancing Audience during the Great Depression." PhD Diss., The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2014. Advisor: David F García. (Received the Wiley Housewright Dissertation Award from the Society for American Music and the Glen Haydon Award for an Outstanding Dissertation in Musicology from UNC-Chapel Hill)
 

Thesis:

Grand Opera as Racial Uplift: The National Negro Opera Company, 1941-1962. MA Thesis, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2009. Advisor: Mark Katz.