Staff profile

Ellie Armon Azoulay is a cultural historian, curator and a dj. This diverse background shaped her pedagogy and her commitment to incorporate multiple approaches to knowledge production, research, and collaborative work.

Her interdisciplinary research is situated at the crossroads of several academic disciplines: US history and American studies, Cultural Studies and CriticalRace Theory across the US and the Black Atlantic. Her research is indebted to and informed by Black studies, Black feminist thought, the Black Radical Tradition, and decolonial and decolonising practices. 

She is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of English Studies working on her new research project, “Sounds of Liberation: The Feminist Vernacular in Jamaican Folklore 1950-1980." 

She is a program comittee member at Newbridge Project in Newcastle (2024-2025) and is currently working on an exhibition and a public program  titled "Resounding Diasporic Sonic Worlds: Archives, Community and Resistance" that will run between 9th of May until 26 of July 2025. https://thenewbridgeproject.com/news/committee-season-now-live/

Since may 2024, she is a resident at Newcastle indepdendet radio station Slack's radio with her monthly show Diasporic Conections. https://soundcloud.com/search?q=diasporic%20connections

She is working on her first book, Reclaiming the Lore: African American Music Collectors, Refusal and Anti-Preservationist Possibilities. The book centralizes the history and the storytelling of African American musical expressions from the end of the 19th century within various Black communities and Black-run and led institutions in the American South such as schools, HBCUs, churches, musical associations, and workers' unions with which these collectors worked. It shows how their different modalities of collecting operated as a pedagogical tool and were inseparable from performing and sharing music as part of communal activity and means to redress rupture with past generations and renew intergenerational practices.

She has a forthcoming chapter on the sonic archives of the African American novelist, folklorist and sound studies pioneer Zora Neale Hurston in a new anthology dedicated to her work (Cambridge UP), and her article on the the African American music educator and radical song collector Willis Laurence James was published in Comparative American Studies An International Journal. https://doi.org/10.1080/14775700.2021.2003136

She has a PhD in American Studies from the University of Kent, and she completed an MRes in Exhibition Studies in Central Saint Martins (UAL). She is an ECR representative of Historians of the Twentieth-Century United States (HOTCUS).