Max Jefferson (she/hers) is a PhD candidate in Musicology at Berkeley and a 2025 recipient of the Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellowship awarded by the American Council of Learned Societies. Her work, broadly, examines histories of Black music in which the narrative pen has been held by Black hands: insider stories. In her 2023 long review for The Opera Quarterly, “Hearing Real Magic in … Iphigenia” she addresses “a growing body of work that honors Blackness and those artists who know from experience the violence of hegemonic archetypes and traditions,” calling for scholarly recognition and attendant critical literatures for this artistic movement. Her forthcoming 2025 article “Sun Ra’s Space Program: Resituating ‘The Forefather of Afrofuturism’” meets this need historically and contemporarily. The article recontextualizes Sun Ra as a political actor rather than the eccentric oddity, writing against Ra’s anachronistic theoretical framing under “Afrofuturism,” and preferring such historically explicative frameworks as “Afro-Surreal Expressionism.” Her dissertation develops from the Sun Ra research, considering the Harlem-based cohort of what she calls Black Nationalist Music (1965-72). Until now, the Black activists who formulated this sonic ideology have only been recorded in disjunct, or at best parallel, narratives that abstract each actor – including Amiri Baraka, Archie Shepp, Cecil Taylor, and Sonya Sanchez – from political or musical context. This work continues a nascent cooperative Black history in music studies – a history engaged with and contributed to by scholars such as George Lewis, Daphne Brooks, Philip Ewell, and Matthew Morrison – that has begun to contend with the fallacy of Black objecthood pervading the field.
Major sources of support for this project have been the H. Robert Cohen/RIPM Endowment Grant awarded by the American Musicological Society, The Eileen Southern Fellowship awarded by the Society for American Music, and the Summer Research Grant awarded by the Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry at the University of California, Berkeley.
Education:
Westminster Choir College (B.M in Voice Performance) – 2014
Yale University (Post-Baccalaureate Studies in Music) – 2019
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (M.M. in Music: Musicology) – 2021
University of California, Berkeley (M.A. in Music: Musicology) – 2022
