Goucher College's
VIRTUAL Authors Series

Melissa R. Klapper, Ph.D., is a professor of history and the director of women’s & gender studies at Rowan University in Glassboro, NJ. She is the author of Jewish Girls Coming of Age in America, 1860-1920 (NYU, 2005); Small Strangers: The Experiences of Immigrant Children in the United States, 1880-1925 (Ivan R. Dee, 2007); and Ballots, Babies, and Banners of Peace: American Jewish Women’s Activism, 1890-1940 (NYU, 2013), which won the National Jewish Book Award in Women’s Studies. Klapper is the recipient of many grants and awards, and she lectures frequently in academic and community settings. Her most recent book is Ballet Class: An American History (Oxford, 2020). Ballet Class is a pathbreaking social history that takes seriously the experiences of the countless everyday people who pursued recreational ballet. The book explores the growth of ballet class as it became an integral part of 20th-century American childhood across borders of gender, class, race, and sexuality. This will be moderated by Vanessa Logan ’95, the executive director of the Texas Ballet Theater.

Kristina R. Gaddy M.F.A '15, author of Well of Souls: Uncovering the Banjo's Hidden History and Flowers in the Gutter: The True Story of the Edelweiss Pirates, Teenagers Who Resisted the Nazis (Dutton 2020), is a Baltimore-based writer and fiddler. Well of Souls was one of The New Yorker's best books of 2022 and named one of 2022's Most Memorable Music Books by No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music. In an extraordinary story unfolding across 200 years, Gaddy uncovers the banjo's key role in Black spirituality, ritual, and rebellion. Through meticulous research in diaries, letters, archives, and art, she traces the banjo's beginnings from the 17th century, when enslaved people of African descent created it from gourds or calabashes and wood. Gaddy shows how the enslaved carried this unique instrument as they were transported and sold by slaveowners throughout the Americas, to Suriname, the Caribbean, and the colonies that became U.S. States, including Louisiana, South Carolina, Maryland, and New York. She has received the Parsons Award from the Library of Congress, the Logan Nonfiction Fellowship, and a Robert W. Deutsch Foundation Rubys artist award. She holds an M.F.A. in nonfiction writing from Goucher College, and an excerpt from her master's thesis won the 2015 Julia Rogers Research Prize. This will be moderated by banjo student Ben Karp '93.