Lehman Brady Professorship

The Center for Documentary Studies coordinates the Lehman Brady Visiting Joint Chair Professorship, a professorship in Documentary Studies and American Studies at Duke and UNC–Chapel Hill. This collaborative, cross-campus arrangement affords significant opportunities for study, research, and participation in educational activities associated with distinguished writers, photographers, filmmakers, and other practitioners and scholars of the documentary arts. The Lehman Brady Professor teaches courses on both campuses and engages in lectures, film screenings, and other events for students and the general public.

The Lehman Brady Visiting Joint Chair Professorship is supported by two endowment funds, one established at the Center for Documentary Studies by the Lyndhurst Foundation and the other established at Duke University by the bequest of Lehman Brady, an attorney from Durham, North Carolina, who died in 1995.

Associated Faculty, Staff and Artists

Cristy Road Carrera

Cristy Road Carrera

Spring 2018 Lehman Brady Professor

Cristy Road Carrera is a Cuban-American artist, writer, and musician who grew up in Miami. Through visual art, storytelling, and punk rock music, Road strives to “testify [to] the beauty of the imperfect. . . .”
David S. Cecelski

David S. Cecelski

Fall 2001-Spring 2002, Fall 2003, Fall 2007 Lehman Brady Professor

Historian David S. Cecelski—whose writing and teaching stems from his passionate commitment to the places, people, and politics of eastern North Carolina—has written extensively on civil rights and North Carolina coastal history.
Portrait of Marie T. Cochran smiling at the camera while facing the sun.

Marie T. Cochran

Fall 2020–Spring 2022 Lehman Brady Professor

Marie Cochran is a self-described cultural pollinator. She is the founder of the Affrilachian Artist Project, which celebrates the intersection of cultures in Appalachia and nurtures a network of individuals and organizations committed to the sustainability of a diverse network throughout the thirteen states of the region. During the span of her residence at CDS, which took place during the global pandemic, Cochran taught a course titled “Black Spaces Matter: Race, Place, Community and Resilience.”
John Cohen

John Cohen

Spring 2004 Lehman Brady Professor

The recent joint releases of powerHouse Books’ There Is No Eye: John Cohen Photographs and Smithsonian Folkways’ CD There Is No Eye: Music For Photographs, recordings of musicians photographed by John Cohen, bring together several threads of Cohen’s work over the past fifty year
Brett Cook

Brett Cook

Spring 2008 Lehman Brady Professor

Brett Cook creates objects, experiences, and feelings that defy classification in any single discipline. His work has been shown at museums and galleries since 1991, concurrent with a practice manifested in public projects since 1984.
A portrait of Myron Dewey

Myron Dewey

Spring 2019 Lehman Brady Professor

Note: Myron Dewey (1972–2021) was Lehman Brady Visiting Joint Chair Professor at Duke University and the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill in Spring 2019; he was based at Duke’s Center for Documentary Studies.
A photo of Von Diaz

Von Diaz

Board of Directors, Spring 2020 Lehman Brady Professor

Von Diaz is a writer, documentary producer, and author of Coconuts & Collards: Recipes and Stories from Puerto Rico to the Deep South. Born in Puerto Rico and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, she explores food, culture, and identity, and currently teaches food studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Alice Gerrard

Alice Gerrard

Spring 2009 Lehman Brady Professor

Alice Gerrard has been documenting music through performance, writing/editing, and film throughout her forty-year career as a traditional musician.
Rayna Green

Rayna Green

Fall 2008 Lehman Brady Professor

Rayna Green is a curator at the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, where she also serves as director of the American Indian Program and as documentary historian for the American Food and Wine History Project. A folklorist with a Ph.D.
Allan Gurganus

Allan Gurganus

Fall 2004-Spring 2005 Lehman Brady Professor

“Allan Gurganus writes without a safety net; no precautions are taken against pathos, bathos, authorial indignity.” So Henry Louis Gates Jr. observed in The Nation: “Gurganus locates the dangerous glamour in ordinariness. He can do anything he likes as a writer.”
Paul Hendrickson

Paul Hendrickson

Fall 2009 Lehman Brady Professor

Paul Hendrickson’s most recent book, Sons of Mississippi (Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), a study of the legacy of racism in the families of seven Mississippi sheriffs of the 1960s, won the National Book Critics Circle Award in general nonfiction and the Heartland Prize presented annually by the Chicago Tribune.
Wesley Hogan

Wesley Hogan

Instructor

Wesley Hogan is an undergraduate instructor at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University and teaches the history of youth social movements, African American history, women’s history and oral history.
Randall Kenan

Randall Kenan

Fall 2002-Spring 2003 Lehman Brady Professor

NOTE: Randall Kenan was a member of the Center for Documentary Studies (CDS) Board of Directors from 2005 until the time of his death in August 2020, in addition to serving as Lehman Brady Visiting Joint Chair Professor at CDS and UNC–Chapel Hill in 2002–03.
Bill C. Malone

Bill C. Malone

2000 Lehman Brady Professor

Historian Bill C. Malone, a retired professor emeritus at Tulane University who is known for his groundbreaking cultural studies of Southern folk and country music, was the inaugural Lehman Brady Chair Professor.
Karen Michel

Karen Michel

Fall 2006-Spring 2007 Lehman Brady Professor

Based in upstate New York, Karen Michel is an independent radio producer who got her start in media as a guest on Art Linkletter's Kids Say the Darndest Things.
Tom Rankin

Tom Rankin

Professor of the Practice/Director, MFAEDA

Tom Rankin is Professor of the Practice of Art and Documentary Studies at Duke University where he directs the MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts. For 15 years he was director of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke. Rankin is formerly Associate Professor of Art and Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi and Chair of the Art Department at Delta State University.
Chris Sims

Christopher Sims

Undergraduate Education Director/Associate Professor of the Practice, Fall 2017 Lehman Brady Fellow

Christopher Sims is the Undergraduate Educator Director at the Center for Documentary Studies and a Lecturing Fellow in Documentary Arts. He has worked as a photo archivist at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. and, at CDS, has coordinated the exhibition, awards, and web programs.
Sam Stephenson

Sam Stephenson

Fall 2012-Spring 2013 Lehman Brady Professor

Since 2002, writer Sam Stephenson has been the director of The Jazz Loft Project at CDS. He has been studying the life and work of photographer W. Eugene Smith since 1997, with much of the work based at CDS. His first book, Dream Street: W.
Charlie Thompson

Charlie Thompson

Professor of the Practice of Cultural Anthropology and Documentary Studies

Charles D. Thompson, Jr. is Professor of the Practice of Cultural Anthropology and Documentary Studies at Duke University. A common thread through his work is a deep concern for people doing their all to have a voice in our agricultural systems.
Natasha Trethewey

Natasha Trethewey

Fall 2005-Spring 2006 Lehman Brady Professor

Natasha Trethewey is author of Native Guard (Houghton Mifflin, 2006), Bellocq's Ophelia (Graywolf, 2002), and Domestic Work (Graywolf, 2000).
Mike Wiley

Mike Wiley

Instructor

Email

mike@mikewileyproductions.com
Marco Williams

Marco Williams

Fall 2014-Spring 2015 Lehman Brady Professor

Marco Williams is a filmmaker and a film educator whose directing credits include The Undocumented; Inside the New Black Panthers; Banished; Freedom Summer; I Sit Where I Want: The Legacy of Brown v.
Deborah Willis

Deborah Willis

Board of Directors; Fall 2000-Spring 2001 Lehman Brady Professor

Deborah Willis, Ph.D., is University Professor and Chair of the Department of Photography and Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University and has an affiliated appointment with the College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, Africana Studies, where she teaches courses on photography and imaging, iconicity, and cultural histories visualizing the black body, women, and gender.