It will be a while before USC students see Kelley in the classroom. He is taking a one-year leave to complete a biography of seminal jazz musician Thelonious Monk. USC houses the Thelonious Monk Institute, a jazz education program headquartered at the university’s Thornton School of Music.
“Robin Kelley’s imaginative and forceful brand of history has provided inspiration to almost a generation of graduate students and established scholars,” says Dr. Joseph Aoun, dean of USC’s College of Arts and Sciences. “Students in the college will benefit from his enthusiasm for teaching and his depth of knowledge.”
At the age of 32, Kelley became one of the youngest full professors in the United States in 1994. Before moving to Columbia, he had been chair of the history department and professor of history and Africana studies at New York University. Kelley had also taught at the University of Michigan, where he was a professor of history, African-American studies and American culture, and last year he spent a semester at Harvard University’s Institute for African and African American Research.
Still, he remains skeptical of Ivy League institutions.
“There’s a whole generation of young people who are taught that it is better to be at Harvard or one of the Ivy League schools,” he says. “That is just not true.”
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