Elea Proctor is an Assistant Professor in the Department of African American and African Studies at The Ohio State University. Dr. Proctor’s scholarship addresses the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality in U.S. popular music and culture, paying specific attention to Black women’s musical performances in the wake of slavery. Dr. Proctor earned her B.A. in Music from Florida State University and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Musicology from Stanford University. Trained as an interdisciplinary musicologist, she was a Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellow (2021–24) who worked across music studies, theater and performance studies, and Black studies. Her areas of expertise include the nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States, identity and performance, African American and Black diasporic musical cultures, and the history of slavery in the Americas. Her current book project traces a genealogy of blackface tropes in Black women vocalists’ performances in the Jim Crow era. Her forthcoming journal article, “Dora Dean and the Performance of Black Womanhood in the ‘Coon Song’ Craze,” will be published in late 2024 in the Journal of the Society for American Music.