Marva Griffin Carter

Boston Conservatory at Berklee (B.M.) - Piano Performance
New England Conservatory of Music (M. M.) - Piano Performance
Boston University (M. A. ) - Musicology
University of Illinois at Urbana (Ph.D.) - Musicology

Music History, Popular and World Musics
Foundation Studies: History, Literature and World Music
African American Musics and the Diaspora
Sacred Music
Musical Biography
Early Broadway Musical Theatre
World Musics

RESEARCH INTERESTS:
The musical history of Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church
The Intersection of race, gender, class and religion
African American music and musicians

COURSES:
World Music
Music, Society and Culture
History of African American Music
Perspectives in Multicultural Popular Music

MARVA GRIFFIN CARTER is an Associate Professor of Music History, Popular and World Musics in the School of Music, with joint affiliation in the Department of Africana Studies at Georgia State University.  Carter is a graduate of Boston Conservatory at Berklee (B.M.) and of New England Conservatory of Music (M.M.) in piano performance.  While at NEC, she heard musicologist Eileen Southern lecture from her bestselling book, Black American Music: A History, and was recruited by her to become a musicologist, concentrating on African Americans.  Subsequently she took Southern’s course in African American music at Harvard.  Later, Marva graduated from Boston University (M.A.) and the University of Illinois at Urbana (Ph.D.) in musicology, where she also studied ethnomusicology with Bruno Nettl and jazz history with Lawrence Gushee.  She is the school’s first and only African American Ph.D. graduate in musicology.

Carter’s administrative/teaching career included: Coordinator, African American Studies Program at Simmons University (Boston); Chair, Music Department at Morris Brown College (Atlanta); Assistant Director, later Director of Graduate Studies, and currently, Co-Chair of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee in the School of Music at Georgia State.

Dr. Carter is the author of the biography, Swing Along: The Musical Life of Will Marion Cook – a pioneer composer of Broadway Black musical comedies at the turn of the twentieth century (Oxford University Press).  She is completing a book for the University of Illinois Press which examines the sacred musical traditions and repertoire of Atlanta’s historic Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Carter was organist for a decade.  Her article on this history was included in “Colloquy: Shadow Culture Narratives: Race, Gender, and American Music Historiography” in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Fall 2020.

Marva Griffin Carter has been active for more than four decades in the American Musicological Society and the Society for American Music, presenting papers and serving on editorial boards, including the Committee on the Publication of American Music. She received the Society for American Music’s coveted Lifetime Achievement Award for 2020. In 2022, Dr. Carter was featured in Harvard Radcliffe Institute's webinar on Black Music and the American University: Eileen Southern's ​Story.