African and African Diaspora Studies

Perfomances

voices of imani

October 18, 2007

Please join Professor Hubert Walters and the Voices of Imani in welcoming Dr. Arthur C. Jones, guest performer from the University of Denver. 
     Dr. Jones will be performing at Boston College on Thursday, October 18 from 7 to 9 p.m. in Lyons Hall in Room 423.  For more information, or to see a map of the area, please see our contact page
   
     Coming to us from Colorado, Dr. Arthur Jones has accomplishments and accolades that stretch over the artistic and academic fields.  Currently, Dr. Jones is a Senior Clinical Professor of Psychology at the University of Denver, where his areas of research include cultural and psychological functions of African American music, African American and intercultural mental health and spirituality, social justice and social change, and Jungian psychology.  As Dr. Jones writes from his website, he has "approached this work as both a professional singer and as a multidisciplinary scholar and teacher." 

     Dr. Jones will be presenting and series of lecture-concerts in the Boston Area from October 18-20.  You can also see him perform on Saturday, October 20, from 1 to 3 p.m. at The Peoples Baptist Church, located at 134 Camden Street in Boston.  For more information on this performance, please call : (617) 427-0424





                dr. Arthur C. Jones, University of Denver, guest performer 

    In addition to his academic work, Dr. Jones is also the founder of The Spirituals Project, a non-profit community agency based at the University of Denver since 1994.  The mission of The Spirituals Project, as stated on their website, is "to preserve and revitalize the music and teachings of the sacred songs called 'spirituals,' created and first sung by enslaved Africans in America in the 18th and 19th centuries."  Dr. Jones is a member of the Project's 70-voice multi-ethnic community choir.  The Spirituals Project also features a multimedia educational website project, school and community programs, an oral history project, and television programs.
    

Critical Praise for Dr. Jones:

“ Arthur Jones…offers us a richly textured, remarkably insightful rendering of the spirituals, their original settings, and their possible meaning for us today…he takes seriously Bernice Johnson Reagon’s concern when she says, ‘I’m not sure if black people can get through the next century without this repertoire.”
                Vincent Harding, author, There is a River: The Black Struggle in America

“Once in a while a book comes along that literally sings…Such is ‘Wade in the Water.’  Arthur Jones has done us all a service by recreating the very fiber of African-American culture.”
                Andrew Billingsley, author, Climbing Jacob’s Ladder

“ A mesmerizing treatise on the beginning, development and refinement of the Negro Spiritual and its important cultural and psychological meanings….It is a welcome addition to our understanding of humanity.”
                Horace Clarence Boyer, author of The Golden Age of Gospel