Ten years after her death, Nina Simone is more popular today than when she was alive. In 2013, Beyonce name-dropped Simone as her sole predecessor in her documentary, Life is but a Dream. This same year, a character based on Simone appeared in the Broadway musical, Soul Doctor, while actress Zoe Saldana set off an Internet firestorm when she was cast in the title role in the upcoming biographical film, Nina. And no one has sampled her more than Kanye West, who has invoked her on all but one of his albums, including Yeezus‘ most controversial track. In this talk, Professor Salamishah Tillet traces how Nina Simone, through her own act of self-fashioning and our subsequent reinventions of her, emerges as one of our most cherished and complicated symbols of “freedom.”
As a rape survivor, scholar, and writer, Dr. Salamishah Tillet has spent her career championing the rights and voices of our most vulnerable citizens. Nominated by Glamour magazine as one of its “Women of the Year,” named as one of the “Top 50 Global Leaders Ending Violence Against Children” by the United Nation’s Safe magazine (2013), and named as one of America’s “Top Leaders Under 30” by Ebony, she has appeared on the BBC, CNN, MSNBC, and NPR; written for The Chicago Tribune, The Guardian, and The Root; and guest blogs for The Nation. Currently, she is an associate professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and has faculty appointments in the Africana studies and gender, sexuality, and women’s studies departments.
In 2003, Salamishah and her sister, Scheherazade Tillet, co-founded A Long Walk Home, Inc., a nonprofit that uses art therapy and the visual and performing arts to end violence against girls and women. Salamishah was also an associate producer of Aishah Shahidah Simmons’ groundbreaking NO! The Rape Documentary and was featured in the award-winning Rape Is … by Cambridge Documentary Films.
She is the author of Sites of Slavery: Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post-Civil Rights Imagination. In 2011, she wrote the liner notes for the three-time Grammy-award-winning album, Wake Up! by John Legend and The Roots. This year, she published Gloria Steinem: The Kindle Singles Interview with Amazon, and she is currently working on a book on Civil Rights icon Nina Simone. She earned her doctorate in the history of American civilization and master’s in English and American literature from Harvard University and her master’s in the art of teaching from Brown University. She has her bachelor’s degree in English and African American studies from the University of Pennsylvania, from which she graduated Magna Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa. In 2010, she was awarded the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Award for Distinguished Teaching by an Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2010-11, she was the recipient of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation Fellow for Career Enhancement and served as a visiting fellow at the Center of African American Studies at Princeton University. In 2013-14, she was invited to be an inaugural member of the Project of the Advancement of Our Common Humanity, a think tank at New York University to focus on our crisis of connection and creating a more just and humane world. She is also a scholar-in-residence at the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
Generously co-sponsored by the Alexa Fullerton Hampton Fund.
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