Rate My Professor Robert O'Meally

Robert G. O’Meally is the Zora Neale Hurston Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he has served on the faculty for thirty years. Holding a B.A. from Stanford University (1970) and a Ph.D. from Harvard University (1975), O’Meally is a prominent scholar in Literature with a focus on African American literature and jazz studies. He founded and formerly directed Columbia’s Center for Jazz Studies, nurturing interdisciplinary research at the nexus of music, literature, and visual arts. His research interests include 19th- and 20th-century American and African-American literature, film, media, and visual studies, African American and African diaspora studies, Literature and Music/Jazz Studies, drama, theatre, and performance studies, painting, photography, American studies, and the Americas, as well as ethnicity, race, and indigenous studies. O’Meally has co-curated major exhibitions for the Smithsonian Institution, Jazz at Lincoln Center (2006-2012), and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, including Romare Bearden’s Black Odyssey.

O’Meally’s key publications encompass authored works such as The Craft of Ralph Ellison (1982), Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday, Romare Bearden: A Black Odyssey (2007), and Antagonistic Cooperation: Collage, Jazz, and American Fiction (Columbia University Press, 2022). He has edited seminal volumes including The Jazz Cadence of American Culture (1998), Living With Music: Ralph Ellison’s Essays on Jazz (2001), History and Memory in African-American Culture (1994, with Geneviève Fabre), Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies (co-edited with Brent Hayes Edwards and Farah Jasmine Griffin), The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (co-edited with Henry Louis Gates, Jr.), and The Romare Bearden Reader (Duke University Press, 2019). For producing the Smithsonian record set The Jazz Singers, he earned a Grammy Award nomination. O’Meally has received Guggenheim and Cullman Fellowships and served as a fellow at Columbia’s Institute for Ideas and Imagination at the Global Center in Paris. In November 2025, the Mellon Foundation awarded a $5.8 million grant to his Jazz Study Group—co-led with composer Courtney Bryan—for the Jazz Generations Initiative, which fosters intergenerational dialogue, oral history interviews with jazz elders, and preservation of jazz heritage. He teaches courses such as Harlem Renaissance (Spring 2020) and continues to shape scholarship in Literature through his interdisciplinary contributions.