The Rosetta Reitz Archive Collective at Duke University

Rosetta Reitz was a 20th century feminist writer, business owner, and record and concert producer. She produced nearly 20 albums of the music of the early women of jazz and the blues.

We are a multidisciplinary, intergenerational research collective comprising archivists, a professional singer/songwriter, academic research staff with sociocultural anthropology and digital humanities expertise, and graduate and undergraduate students from across a variety of schools and disciplines at Duke University.

In our research, we engage with the Rosetta Reitz papers, an archive housed at Duke that holds the materials of this feminist activist, writer, and arts entrepreneur. In the late 20th century, Reitz established a music label and organized live performances and lectures to spotlight overlooked Black women performers of early blues and jazz. As we explore the music, art, and writing in this archive, we seek to re-vision the past and generate more hopeful imaginings for the future through our own scholarly and artistic creations while also making the archive more visible for others to explore.

Join our collective  to help bring the spirit of Rosetta Reitz into contemporary artistic and scholarly practice.