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) working 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, provisionally titled Jump Jane Crow: Black Women and the Blackface Minstrelsy Tradition, examines how Black women shaped blackface minstrelsy in the long nineteenth century.

Sample Publications

Proctor, Elea. “Dora Dean and the Performance of Black Womanhood in the ‘Coon Song’ Craze.” Journal of the Society for American Music, 18, no. 4 (2024): 383–404.  https://doi.org/10.1017/S1752196324000403.

Proctor, Elea. “A Review of T.O.B.A. Time: Black Vaudeville and the Theater Owners’ Booking Association in Jazz-Age America.” The Black Theatre Review 3, no. 2 (2025), 64-66. https://doi.org/10.2458/tbtr.9607.