A evening with Nile Rodgers

Arizona State University, the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, and the Humanities Institute presents a conversation with legendary musician and songwriter, Nile Rodgers. Nile is a Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee, Songwriters Hall of Fame inductee and a multiple Grammy Award winning songwriter, composer, producer, arranger and guitarist. 

Most recently he became the first creator to be awarded a Lifetime Achievement Grammy for his legacy in the same year as being awarded a Grammy for his work with Beyoncé on the smash hit “Cuff It”. 

As the co-founder of CHIC, Nile pioneered a musical language that generated chart-topping hits like "Le Freak”, the biggest selling single in the history of Atlantic Records and sparked the advent of hip-hop with "Good Times” and “Rapper’s Delight”. 

His work in The CHIC Organization, including “We Are Family” for Sister Sledge and “I’m Coming Out” for Diana Ross, and his productions for artists such as David Bowie (“Let’s Dance”), Madonna (“Like A Virgin”) and Duran Duran (“The Reflex”), have sold more than 600 million albums and 200 million singles worldwide, while his innovative, trendsetting collaborations with Daft Punk, Daddy Yankee, LE SSERAFIM, Coldplay and Beyoncé reflect the vanguard of contemporary hits. 

Nile served as the first-ever Chief Creative Advisor for the iconic Abbey Road Studios in London and is the Chairman of the Songwriters Hall of Fame. 

Rogers is co-founder and chairman of the We Are Family Foundation, which empowers young people globally through programs like Three Dot Dash, a youth leadership storytelling and mentoring program. The Foundation also runs the Youth to the Front Fund, which supports BIPOC youth at the forefront of fighting systemic racism, inequality and injustice, and Youth to the Table, which brings youth voices to decision making tables that are shaping humanity’s future.  

In dialogue 

This event features an on-stage dialogue with Nile Rodgers. As the keynote event for Love: A RaceB4Race Symposium, the conversation will explore the ways Black music and culture have created love, joy, and community building as a form of resistance.  

The interlocutor for this event is Mitchell S. Jackson, the John O. Whiteman Dean’s Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at Arizona State University.  

Mitchell S. Jackson is the winner of the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing and the 2021 National Magazine Award in Feature Writing. His debut novel The Residue Years won a Whiting Award and The Ernest J. Gaines Prize for Literary Excellence. His essay collection Survival Math: Notes on an All-American Family was named a best book of 2019 by fifteen publications.  

Jackson is also the author of Fly: The Big Book of Basketball Fashion, described by the New York Times, as “A coffee-table book that elevates the subject to the same decorative status as a Dior or Gucci monograph.” Jackson’s other honors include fellowships, grants, and awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, Creative Capital, the Cullman Center of the NYPL, the Lannan Foundation, PEN, and TED. His writing has been featured on the cover of the New York Times Magazine, the New York Times Book Review, Time, Esquire, and Men’s Health, as well as in The New Yorker, Harpers, Harper’s Bazaar, The Paris Review, The Guardian, and elsewhere. Jackson is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Esquire. 

RaceB4Race 

Hosted by the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, RaceB4Race is an annual research symposium and network of scholars working in premodern critical race studies. Bridging many traditional disciplinary divides, RaceB4Race not only creates innovative scholarly dialogues, but also fosters professional development and structural change within the many fields of premodern studies. 

This year’s symposium theme is Love, and features speakers from the fields of premodern critical race studies. The symposium explores the concept of love in the broadest sense. How does race inform the way we conceive of love? How does it influence our capacity to love? What does it mean to love in a time of turmoil, and what can the premodern world teach us about this? How do we negotiate loving a being, a nation, a profession that fails to love us back? In a time where hateful rhetoric floods our media and culture, how do we imagine, build, and sustain communities of love? 

About the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies 

The Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies is a research center based at Arizona State University that enables and promotes the most expansive, creative, and daring scholarship in premodern studies. 
 
ACMRS was originally established in 1981 by the Arizona Board of Regents as a state-wide, tri-university research unit that bridged the intellectual communities at Arizona State University, Northern Arizona University, and the University of Arizona. 
 
Now, ACMRS serves not only our community of scholars and students in Arizona, but also scholars of premodern studies all over the world. The center supports faculty, early career researchers, and students whose research engages the past and points us to different, more inclusive, futures.