Biography
Sonnet Retman is an Associate Professor of American Ethnic Studies where she teaches courses in African American literature, cinema, popular music studies and new media. She has been the recipient of a UC Humanities Research Institute Postdoctoral Fellowship and a Woodrow Wilson Junior Faculty Career Enhancement Fellowship. Her first book, Real Folks: Race and Genre in the Great Depression (Duke 2011), investigates how hybrid forms of documentary and satire theorized and challenged populist conceptions of a racialized folk in the 1930s. Her work on race, gender, genre and performance has appeared in journals such as American Quarterly, PMLA Journal, American Literature, Women and Performance, African American Review, and Museum Anthropology. She serves on the editorial board of American Studies Journal. She is currently working on a book about black popular music, recording technology and memory in the early 20th Century. She is a collaborator with the Women Who Rock Project @ http://content.lib.washington.edu/wwrweb/index.html.