At 6:30 p.m., the event began with an introduction of “BULLY! Theodore Roosevelt, ‘A Locomotive in Human Pants’ vs. JONATHAN EDWARDS, His Pet Black Bear.” At 7:00 p.m., the historical fantasy and political spectacle performance began. By 7:20 p.m., Roosevelt had fought his bear. A ten-minute Q&A followed, closing a reflective night that combined humor and theater.

The original performance marked the 20th anniversary of the Davis Performing Arts Center. But rather than simply celebrating two decades of performances, the evening examined the building and its unique history through a boxing performance and exhibition.

Co-curators , an assistant professor in the Department of Performing Arts, and , an educator and curator based in New York, emphasized that the center’s story stretches much further back than 20 years. 

“The Davis Center has always been a space of performance,” Tran Nguyen said. “It’s always been a space where Georgetown has been looking to create bodies in certain ways and put them on display.”  

The Building’s Origin

The anniversary became an opportunity not just to commemorate, but to investigate.

“We were specifically interested in the building itself,” Fleming said. “If you’re going to do a celebration of the building, what is this building about?”

That question led Tran Nguyen and Fleming, who are frequent collaborators, into Georgetown’s archives, where they found historic photographs. Many of those images, the curators discovered, documented basketball teams or building renovations. The curators wondered how they could “activate the space and the images,” as Fleming put it.

The answer lay in the building’s origin.

The Davis Performing Arts Center originally began as a gymnasium. When Ryan Gymnasium opened in 1906, “this idea was about creating a well-rounded and healthy student body made up of Georgetown’s male student population,” Fleming said. The university would not become until long after the building ceased serving as a gym.

That discovery revealed what Fleming called “the connection between a performing arts center and a gymnasium: both were about performing bodies.” The functions may have changed, but the space has always shaped and displayed bodies.

“As you travel around the exhibition’s panels displaying photographs from this building’s history, you will also see passages from texts written by students, professors and reporters describing the space as a body or part of a body,” Fleming said. “We were very interested in bringing to the surface not only how the space functioned for the display of the university community over time, but also how the building itself was conceptualized through the metaphor of a performing body.”  

Masculinity as Performance

The Roosevelt thread emerged through , Georgetown’s first Director of Physical Education.

Joyce had a background in circus performance and was one of Roosevelt’s boxing coaches. At the time, Roosevelt himself delivered an impromptu commencement speech for the university where he talked about the importance of cultivating healthy bodies through exercise and sport.

From that history came a creative leap.

Tran Nguyen and Fleming invited artist to respond to the archive they had uncovered about Ryan Gymnasium. Working together, they imagined a fantasy boxing match. Mateik brought that idea to life by staging Roosevelt in a theatrical bout against his own bear. 

Yes, Roosevelt had a pet bear. He rescued it as a cub and kept it for a time before eventually parting with it.

In performance, that historical detail became a spectacle. The bear sharpened the evening’s central theme: masculinity as performance.

The original gymnasium cultivated strength as an institutional ideal. It aimed to produce a disciplined male body representing national vigor. The theater, opened 20 years ago, also seeks to cultivate well-rounded students, but a different kind.

By placing Roosevelt in the ring, Mateik rendered that masculinity theatrical. His exaggerated gestures and bravado made visible what had always been implicit: strength itself is staged.

The performance also invited reflection on Georgetown’s shift from an all-male institution to a coed university, and on how gender is performed in the gym and in the theater. The building has changed functions, but it has consistently been a site where bodies are formed, displayed and interpreted.

Performing Body Through the Arts

The broader exhibition, “Gym Time,” reinforces this idea. Sixty-nine archival panels line the Davis Center lobby, tracing how the building has been imagined over time.

The structure was described in a Georgetown Record article as a “nerve center” during its administrative period. During basketball games, the students came together to watch basketball and the athleticism of movement. Today, it is a performing body through the arts.

“The building itself has always been thought of as a body,” Fleming said.

The boxing performance did not replace that history. It layered it. For 20 minutes, the gymnasium resurfaced inside the theater. Roosevelt’s rhetoric about cultivating strong men echoed in a contemporary moment still preoccupied with health, strength and national identity.

After the final bell, a brief Q&A allowed the audience to unpack the archival research, the choice of the bear and the building’s transformation. By 7:30 p.m., the boxing ring was gone. But the purpose of the building remained. The center has always been about performing bodies.

All photos by Jinlin Liu (C’28) for Georgetown University șŁœÇÂÛÌł of Arts & Sciences.

His trumpet teacher, a retired member of the United States Marine Band, taught Desinord how to learn scales by providing the first few and then challenging him to figure out the rest based on patterns he saw. It became a game for Desinord.

“I would sit and I would write out everything,” he said. “He only asked me to do the next scale for the next week, but I did all of them. From that point, I was hooked.”

Desinord is now the one teaching others.

This fall, the he joined the șŁœÇÂÛÌł of Arts & Sciences as a and an assistant professor of music in the Department of Performing Arts. He will spend his first year researching before teaching music theory courses starting next fall. Desinord’s current research focuses on harmony and gospel music. 

“Basically, I look at how harmony is used as a communicative tool,” he said. “How it transmits emotions and feelings within a song but also within church services.”

The interdisciplinary nature of the șŁœÇÂÛÌł excites Desinord. He hopes to collaborate with colleagues in philosophy, linguistics and Black studies, among other fields.

“I look forward to Richard taking advantage of the interconnections within the department and across the university,” said , a professor of music and chair of the Department of Performing Arts. “He is poised to produce impactful scholarship that reflects the generosity and collaboration of colleagues here. I also look forward to seeing him develop new intellectual spaces that invite students into his expertise and curiosity, particularly in how he thinks about music theory and race.”

Sources of Inspiration

Desinord was born and raised in DC to Haitian immigrant parents who he calls his “greatest source of inspiration.”

“They exemplified hard work, perseverance and selflessness in pursuit of a better life for our family,” he said.

Midway through elementary school, Desinord and his family moved to Prince George’s County in Maryland, and he graduated from the Center for the Visual and Performing Arts (CVPA) at Suitland High School. 

It was during his time there that the teaching spark first emerged. By senior year, Desinord’s music theory teacher had given him opportunities to tutor his peers and lead lessons.

“Those experiences revealed how rewarding it could be to help others engage with and understand new material, and they solidified my interest in education as a vocation,” Desinord said. 

Teachers have always had a big impact on him, and Desinord marveled at the influence his teachers had over students. 

“I was really inspired by teachers who really cared about what we were doing, who really emphasized core parts of teaching but also were just really human,” he said. “I understood that I was growing in their presence.”

Prior to Georgetown, Desinord served as an assistant professor of music theory at Michigan State University and a lecturer of music theory at Howard University. He also taught music at a public middle school in DC for three years. 

Desinord has a Ph.D. in music theory from the Eastman School of Music, an master’s in music theory from Penn State University and a Bachelor of Music in music education from Howard University. 

At Georgetown, Desinord said he plans to teach courses on Black music, including analysis and the history of gospel and R&B. 

“That ‘aha moment,’ to watch somebody learn something — I don’t care if it’s me doing it or anyone else — that moment is really inspiring to see,” Desinord said.

Academic Role Models

There were moments during Desinord’s academic journey where he doubted himself. 

While flipping through a copy of Music Theory Spectrum, a leading journal in the field of music theory, as an undergraduate, Desinord thought to himself, “I cannot do this. I’m not intelligent enough to do this.”

He explains that part of the reason he felt that way is because he did not see many Black people studying music theory nor many academics in the field studying it from a Black perspective. Desinord’s professors urged him to keep going.

“I was fortunate to take classes with Black professors at Howard University in the field who not only modeled exceptional teaching but also encouraged and nurtured my research interests,” he said. “Seeing them excel in a space where representation is still limited was profoundly inspiring and affirmed my desire to contribute to the discipline in my own way.”

, Desinord wrote for Music Theory Spectrum, and his scholarly work has also appeared in the , and . 

“I understand the difficulty of looking at a field and seeing how few numbers there are of people like you and how daunting that could feel,” Desinord said. “A piece of advice is to not let the scarcity of people like you keep you from doing something. It just takes one.”

The past two decades of recovery have brought sweeping changes to New Orleans, as rising prices and unequal recovery have extended the effects of the flood.

This October, 20 years later, Georgetown University hosted the , sponsored by the and . The event reflected on the legacy of the disaster from an interdisciplinary perspective and through the lens of environmental justice. 

The symposium focused on how “the residents of New Orleans and their partners 
 are working with imagination and creativity and brilliance to address and create conditions for justice at a community level,” said (C’90, G’91), an associate dean in the șŁœÇÂÛÌł of Arts & Sciences and founding director of the .Ìę

Preserving Community and Culture

The symposium was the second of its kind. In 2015, Georgetown’s Film and Media Studies Program held the Katrina@10 Symposium, which featured panels, film screenings and a musical performance that explored the impacts of Hurricane Katrina on memory, culture and social justice in New Orleans. 

The symposium this year began with a screening of , a film about preserving community and culture in the aftermath of Katrina, held at both the Hilltop and Capitol campuses. 

The program continued later in the week with two panels, split up by a musical performance by , a 2022 NEA Jazz Master and Grammy-nominated saxophonist from New Orleans, in the McNeir Auditorium.

The first panel, The Wild, Wild Creation: New Orleans Living Culture as Recovery and Resistance, was led by Cook and featured Harrison, , an artist, educator and , and , a professor in the Department of Black Studies.

The panelists discussed New Orleans as the heart of Caribbean and American culture, the intersection of Black performance and protest, the difficulties of sustaining a living culture during displacement — especially for Black, working-class New Orleanians — and the impacts of environmental injustice and racism. 

“Katrina happened, but it didn’t happen to everyone in the same ways,” Cook said during the panel. 

Harrison spoke about the historic importance of , a place in the city where enslaved people would congregate on Sundays that is now famous for its jazz music. 

“One of the things about Congo Square was to keep the music alive so that you could have some kind of connection,” Harrison said. “It’s an ancestral place.”

The second panel, New Orleans Community-Based Innovation and Alternative Visions for the Future, was led by , an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and author of Gardens of Hope: Cultivating Food and the Future in a Post-Disaster City. It featured , founder of the , , a sociologist, artist and activist, and , the executive director of the . 

The discussion covered the challenges and opportunities in community organizing and re-building during the 20 years since Katrina. The panelists also spoke about barriers faced by Black communities in New Orleans, as well as their achievements. Successes have included Mwendo’s Backyard Gardeners Network, which has worked to strengthen the 9th Ward of New Orleans, the , which a grant from the U.S. Economic Development Administration in 2017 and the , the first community land trust in New Orleans which was founded by griffin. 

“Inequality is spatialized within a built environment,” said griffin. “We see it all the time, but it doesn’t always resonate. So social and economic inequality, we can see it within a built environment. So if it’s structurally or architecturally designed, it can be structurally and architecturally un»ć±đČőŸ±Č”ČÔ±đ»ć.”

A Necessary Reflection

For many undergraduate students, Hurricane Katrina happened a lifetime ago — or even before they were born.

The Katrina@20 Symposium served to remind the Georgetown community of the lasting impacts of the disaster that are still felt today. 

The city of New Orleans has helped shape America and is crucial in the connection between the United States, the Caribbean and Central and Latin America. Katrina and its aftermath revealed how catastrophes often have unequal impacts on Americans, as working class and Black residents of New Orleans were unevenly impacted during and after the disaster. 

Continuing the discussion of Katrina is key to remembering these lessons.

“It’s still extremely important for America and the world, but for Americans especially to understand what happened, what it revealed, how its effects were unevenly felt, how poor people, working-class Black folks and others, had a much more difficult time recovering,” Cook said.

Photos by Nate Findlay (C’27) and Francesca Scovino (C’27).

So, Harbert didn’t truly understand how his book, Instrument of the State: A Century of Music in Louisiana’s Angola Prison, would be received publicly until recently. 

This past year, Harbert, a professor of music and chair of the Department of Performing Arts in the șŁœÇÂÛÌł of Arts & Sciences, won three prestigious awards for the book, which was published in 2023: the , the and the .

“Each one has meant something different,” Harbert said of the awards. “It is certainly validating when you get a response from a book.”

Instrument of the State chronicles more than a century of musical history from incarcerated individuals at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, commonly known as “Angola” in reference to the country of origin for many of the enslaved people who lived on the former plantation. The penitentiary still exists today and is the largest maximum-security prison in the U.S. with thousands of inmates.Ìę

In the book, Harbert pieces together oral history and archival research to show how incarcerated individuals at the prison have found rare creative expression and a limited experience of freedom through music.

“It gives us an opportunity to think of prison as a disorganized, haphazard, conditional and historical institution,” he said.

The Society for American Music annually gives out the Irving Lowens Book Award for the book it judges as the best in the field of American music. The organization praised Instrument of the State for its “compelling narrative” that centers the voices of incarcerated musicians. 

“It opens the door to a musical world long hidden from view and prompts readers to ‘listen longer’ to the message of Angola Prison’s musical presence,” in its announcement.

The recognition meant a lot to Harbert. 

“It’s regarded as the biggest prize in the study of American music,” he said. “So that feels good.”

Each year, the American Musicological Society honors a book of “exceptional merit that both illuminates some important aspect of the music of the United States and places that music in a rich cultural context” with the Music in American Culture Award.

The organization’s awards committee wrote that, “By placing familiar stories in new contexts, we come to understand the powerful role(s) music can play in an oppressive system. Instrument of the State matters in ways subtle and profound. It challenges us to rethink old myths about the authenticity of Black music and it brings us face to face with the abomination of justice that is the American prison system.”

For Harbert, that award meant that his book was “approachable and resonant beyond the academic impact.”

“My colleague in the History Department gives everybody this advice: write for humans,” Harbert said. “So to get that prize meant that I had followed John’s advice.”

The Portia K. Maultsby Prize, given out by the Society of Ethnomusicology “recognizes the most distinguished English-language monograph in the field of ethnomusicology, with the focus being African American music and/or Black music of the diaspora.”

The organization’s awards committee wrote that Harbert “approaches this project with more care and substance, doing extensive archival research and interviews and giving honor and dignity to his conversation partners, and thereby producing a book that will have reverberations across and beyond the field.”

Chloe Hornbostel (C’26), a government major and music minor who took Harbert’s American music ethnography and rock history courses, called the book an “eye-opening read.” 

“It played a large role in my understanding and appreciation of music’s ability to carry significant historical weight,” she said. “The book taught me more about the ways in which culture and expression persist in spite of social or legal hindrances.”

Harbert said that winning the three awards reinforced to him that the musicians’ stories mattered and that they’re part of the American story. After learning of each award, he would send updates to the incarcerated musicians at Angola.

Myron Hodges, a guitarist for the Angola Big River Band, wrote in one of the book’s foreword that he was “deeply honored” to be a part of Instrument of the State.

“Instrument of the State is like no other book I’ve read about Angola because it doesn’t stereotype its subjects,” Hodges wrote. “Instead, it focuses on the musical history and the endeavors of men serving time, those of us who seek to achieve a sense of purpose, meaning, peace and normalcy in our lives, using our musical abilities to captivate the hearts and minds of our audiences and our keepers.”

By housing the initiative in historic Old North – the oldest academic building on the Hilltop – the university is symbolically and formally recommitting to, and celebrating, the humanities. Since the university’s founding in 1789, the humanities have been central to a Georgetown education. 

Today, they offer students an entry point into interdisciplinary research that pushes the boundaries of knowledge and facilitates journeys of personal growth.

“The humanities will broaden a student’s perspective of the world around us through a deeper understanding of the human condition and cultures,”  said Toni Boucher, (P’98, ‘00, ‘04), one of the initiative’s founding donors. “The skills developed through the humanities include communication, writing, evaluation of ideas, problem-solving and critical thinking skills, which are essential in any profession.”

Getting Into the Gilded Age

Davis Fellow Melinda Reed (C’25) spent the summer bringing the humanities into her personal passion project, a novel set in the Gilded Age. 

“I wanted to turn a novel I’d started as a teenager into a historically accurate, textured work that I could send to literary agencies,” said Reed, a justice and peace studies major and creative writing minor. “In service of that specific personal goal, my alien-in-the-archives mentality worked—it allowed me to be curious and to approach my research with the mind of an artist as well as a historian.”

Reed began working on the book when she was 16 during a summer writing camp at Georgetown.  

“We went to the National Gallery of Art and were supposed to write something based on a painting,” said Reed. “So, I picked a painting, “Study of Lilia” by Carolus-Duran, and started writing what would become my first novel that I finished in quarantine. Fast forward five years and I started building an academic project around my creative writing, realizing that there were a lot of gaps in that novel because originally I was writing it for fun and not for historical accuracy.”

The book begins the same year Carolus-Duran painted his piece: 1887. A bildungsroman, it follows 19-year-old Lilia Daley from her sheltered rural life through an unplanned pregnancy and a clash of cultures as she begins working as a maid for a wealthy family on the New England coast. 

Reed cites several faculty and staff members at Georgetown as being instrumental to the completion of the project, including creative writing professor and historian , who helped point her in the right direction when she began doing research. Outside of class, Reed worked as a student employee at the Center for , where the  staff were able to help her reframe her creative project as a piece of academic research. 

Reed began her summer in Rhode Island, where she conducted formal research and informal exploration of one of the settings in her work. 

“I’d visited Newport when I was a kid and I remembered these mansions that are typically associated with the Gilded Age and the incredible amount of wealth that certain families had to have these summer homes on the coast,” said Reed. “I was there looking at the current experience and talking to anybody who would talk to me–all of the tour guides were lovely and would talk about the period and help me get a sense of the physical space that the story was set in.” 

Once Reed was back home in New Jersey, she began commuting into New York City to do archival research. There, she looked through journals and letters from the Gilded Age to get a firsthand look at how her characters should speak, act, and think. 

“I got so invested in the stories of the people that I was reading about–reading very personal documents that they probably never intended for anyone else to look at,” said Reed. “I was very aware of that kind of privilege and that distant violation of privacy–to be able to read these documents and meet people who had lived so long ago and had all these emotions and feelings that they put on the page. I honestly felt honored to get a glimpse into their lives.” 

“After doing the research, I realized how much work the book needs in order to make it something I’m willing to send out. Now, I have a clearer sense of what I want the book to look like. 

“Research, broadly defined, is the process of discovery,” said Reed. “But in our attempt to define it more specifically, we’ve narrowed our understanding of what research can be, creating laws and a locked gate professing that only the qualified are allowed to enter and discover for themselves.”

Reconstructing Paradise in the Humanities

Inspiration struck Alex Wang (C’25) during an introductory English literature course when she first read John Milton’s Paradise Lost. 

“All the texts we were reading were canonized—that’s why they’re in a survey course,” said Wang. “I read Paradise Lost and it was such a long, dense, and incredibly beautiful text. It was so good and so amazing, but in many ways it didn’t provide a foundational story that was relatable to me, personally, and to the community that I identify with.”

Wang, who also received a Davis Fellowship to pursue her humanities research over the summer, scripted a one-act theatrical adaptation of Paradise Lost. At the end of the summer, she marked the completion of her script with a reading staged and attended by her close friends.

“I sought to create a world, a paradise, that I wish to live in,” said Wang. “Even with minimal tech, I attempted to envision a coherent space. Having been a director and designer, I often see a world on stage more vividly than I can on paper—and that’s where the audience comes in.”

Wang is a double major in English and political economy with a minor in theater and performance studies. 

“Paradise Lost can establish aesthetics often aligning with mainstream productions, I sought to create a world, a paradise, that I wish to live in. Even with minimal tech, I attempted to envision a coherent space. Having been a director and designer, I often see a world on stage more vividly than I can on paper—and that’s where the audience comes in.

“Universal might not be the right word, but I believe that the script reflects a queer experience that is not just Chinese or only related to one religion,” said Wang. “I hope this work is the first step toward creating more intersectional and cross-cultural projects.”  

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This book represents the culmination of more than decade of Harbert engaging in intensive research and ongoing collaboration with incarcerated individuals.

“When I was first introduced to Benjamin J. Harbert, I thought he was just another person that would come in, take pictures and tell us what he wanted—and that we would never hear from him again,” wrote Calvin Lewis, a drummer for the Angola Jazzmen Band in a foreword for the book. “But he continued his communication with the musicians and continued to come back
 In our eyes, he’s a person that incarcerated musicians in Louisiana prisons can call a friend.”

The History of Angola

In 1870, Samuel L. James, a former Confederate officer, won a contract from Louisiana to lease the state’s prisoners and force them to work. A decade later, James moved his operation to the former Angola plantation, so-named for the country from which a majority of the enslaved people were taken. 

In the early days, state prisoners were housed in slave barracks and put to work growing agricultural products like cotton. Today, the Louisiana State Penitentiary persists. It is the country’s largest maximum-security prison housing some 6,300 incarcerated individuals.

Within Angola, there is a rich musical history and a vibrant present, complete with bands that perform at events within the prison and, occasionally, outside its walls. The legendary blues singer Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Lead Belly, is perhaps the most notable performer from Angola.

In Instrument of the State, Harbert dives deep into the history and ever-fluid present of Angola, tracing the external forces and internal cultures that have shaped the prion’s music.

“Policy changes, legal decisions, demographic shifts, reform and economic realities all change the sound of music,” Harbert writes. “I am interested in that change.”

Harbert’s Audio Odyssey

For the incarcerated musicians whose story the book tells, it is a breath of fresh air.

“Instrument of the State is like no other book I’ve read about Angola because it doesn’t stereotype its subjects,” writes Myron Hodges, a guitarist for the Angola Big River Band, in one of the book’s forewords. “Instead, it focuses on the musical history and the endeavors of men serving time, those of us who seek to achieve a sense of purpose, meaning, peace and normalcy in our lives, using our musical abilities to captivate the hearts and minds of our audiences and our keepers.”

Harbert first began exploring music within Louisiana’s penitentiary system while working on his Ph.D. at the University of California, Los Angeles under documentarian Marina Goldovskaya. In 2013, three years after finishing his dissertation, Harbert released a documentary, Follow Me Down, that traced musical traditions in three Louisiana prisons, including Angola.

In the ensuing decade, Harbert has maintained contact with incarcerated musicians at Angola, studying their artwork and their material reality.  That commitment is part and parcel of his mission in Instrument of the State, to the story of Angola’s musicians as part of a larger narrative.

“In contrast with folklorists who preceded me, I am not collecting two-and-a-half-minute-long songs,” explains Harbert. “I am trying to listen longer. What if we think of Angola’s music as a song cycle, a musical sound that has continued for over a hundred years?”

The effect of his work is larger than the pages it’s contained on – he deftly weaves historical narrative, first-person accounts, interviews and the musicality of the place into one cohesive story.

Within Georgetown’s șŁœÇÂÛÌł of Arts & Sciences, Harbert serves as a professor in and chair of the . He is also the Director of Undergraduate Studies in Music. Harbert, a guitarist himself, teaches courses on guitar theory, rock history and music in American prisons.

Published by Oxford University Press, , is now available wherever books are sold. 

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