Biographical Sketch Edwin Hill's research seeks to highlight the marginalized intellectual and cultural dialogs of the black Atlantic diaspora that have taken place, and continue to take place, in France. Professor Hill has published and/or presented on contemporary Caribbean writers, Sub-Saharan francophone literature, African-American popular music, French chanson, and francophone hip hop. Similarly, his teaching interests, while focused on black vernacular culture and France, extend from the poetry of Negritude writers to postcolonial explorations of contemporary francophone writers and musicians. His current book project “Black Soundscapes White Stages: The Meaning of Sound in the Francophone Black Atlantic” considers the torn aesthetic and ideological relationships between Antillean music and literature from the 1920s to 1960s to be a colonial struggle over the meaning of Caribbean vernacular culture. Informed by an interdisciplinary formation (Bachelor Degree in Music Performance, PhD in French and Francophone Studies), "Black Soundscapes White Stages" relocates the marginalized voices of the black diaspora through the discursive matrix of French imperialism and the cultural history of the French West Indies. In the past two years as assistant professor at USC, Edwin Hill created "Project Banlieue: French Peri/Urban Cultures and Crises" promoting interdisciplinary scholarship about the riots in France in 2005 and 2007. During the 2008-2009 year, Project Banlieue consisted of two major events: 1) a year-long lecture series featuring five internationally recognized senior scholars in the social sciences; 2) a colloquium featuring six junior humanities scholars from around the country. This year, thanks to a grant from Visions and Voices: The USC university-wide Arts and Humanities Initiative, "Project Banlieue" is coordinating "Kourtrajmé: A New New Wave in French Peri/Urban Cinema," an event bringing in three cutting-edge urban French and French-African visual artists to screen and discuss their short films, documentaries, and music videos for USC and the local community.