Rate My Professor Farah Griffin

Farah Jasmine Griffin is University Professor at Columbia University, where she holds the William B. Ransford Professorship of English and Comparative Literature and African American Studies. She previously served as the inaugural Chair of the Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies from 2019 to 2021. Griffin earned a B.A. in History and Literature from Harvard University and a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University. She also directs the Scholars-in-Residence Program at the Schomburg Center and serves on the board of The Brotherhood/Sister Sol.

Griffin's research interests encompass African American literature, literature and music (particularly jazz studies), history and politics, 20th- and 21st-century American literature, the Americas, and the African diaspora, race, ethnicity, and Indigenous studies. She has published extensively on race, gender, feminism, and cultural politics. Her key books include Who Set You Flowin'?: The African-American Migration Narrative (Oxford University Press, 1995); If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday (Free Press, 2001); Clawing at the Limits of Cool: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and the Greatest Jazz Collaboration Ever, co-authored with Salim Washington (Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press, 2008); Harlem Nocturne: Women Artists and Progressive Politics During World War II (Basic Books, 2013); Read Until You Understand: The Profound Wisdom of Black Life and Literature (W.W. Norton & Company, 2021); and In Search of a Beautiful Freedom: New and Selected Essays (W.W. Norton & Company, 2023). Among her edited works are Beloved Sisters and Loving Friends: Letters from Rebecca Primus of Royal Oak, Maryland, and Addie Brown of Hartford, Connecticut, 1854-1868 (Knopf, 1999); Stranger in the Village: New and Selected Essays, co-edited with Cheryl Fish (Beacon Press, 1998); and Uptown Conversations: The New Jazz Studies, co-edited with Brent Hayes Edwards and Robert G. O'Meally (Columbia University Press, 2004).

A recipient of the 2021 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, the 2022 Lionel Trilling Book Award for Read Until You Understand, the Society of Columbia Graduates 2020 Great Teacher Award, and a Mellon Foundation Fellowship in Residence, Griffin's scholarship bridges literary analysis with performance. She collaborated with composer and pianist Geri Allen on two musical works honoring Black women jazz artists, performed at the Apollo Theater, Harlem Stage, and the Kennedy Center. Her contributions have profoundly influenced the fields of African American studies and literature.