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. During her graduate training, 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 United States. Her book project currently in development examines how Black women shaped the tradition of blackface minstrelsy in the long nineteenth century, from its antebellum origins to its evolution into other musical-theatrical forms like vaudeville, burlesque, the revue, and musical theater. 

Sample Publications

Proctor, Elea. “Dora Dean and the Performance of Black Womanhood in the ‘Coon Song’ Craze.” Journal of the Society for American Music, 2024, 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1752196324000403