Nicole T. Rustin

nrustin@uiuc.edu

Research Assistant Professor of Communications

Assistant Professor of Afro-American Studies and Research

Primary areas of interest: African American cultural history and theory (including music, film, literature); gender and sexuality studies and theory; urban studies and theory







Professor Rustin teaches courses on African Americans and the 1950s; jazz and urban life; music and the U.S. racial imagination; African Americans and film; and race, gender, and sexuality in African American history. Her research and courses are aimed at expanding and complicating our understanding of African American cultural practices and history. She is primarily interested in both the ways in which discourses are constructed, debated, and reconstructed over time and how people understand their own experiences and attempt to give them meaning through cultural forms.

Professor Rustin is currently revising her dissertation, entitled "Mingus Fingers: Charles Mingus, Black Masculinity, and Postwar Jazz Culture," into a book examining discourses about race and masculinity in post-World War II jazz culture.

Ph.D., American Studies, New York University