Dear fans of African American sacred music,
You are cordially invited to attend a “Sing to the Rafters” choral music reading session with Dr. James Abbington of Emory University and GIA Publications. This will be the first public program co-sponsored by the new Spiritual Gifts International Project in the Washington, D.C. Metro Area. The $25 per person registration fee ($20 per person for groups of 10 or more) includes a music packet valued at $30.
Please use the following information to mark your calendars:
“Sings to the Rafters”
Dr. James Abbington, Clinician
Howard University, Department of Music
Childers Recital Hall, (Rm. 3001)
Washington, D.C. — Saturday, October 8, 2016
9:30 a.m. – 12:45 p.m.
Dr. James Abbington
I hope that you can join me in Washington for this event, and take advantage of the opportunity to visit the District’s many tourist attractions, including the new National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial, among others.
*Program subject to change. For program updates or more information about the Spiritual Gifts International Project, please continue to read my blog (https://rashadcenter.wordpress.com/), follow me on Facebook, or email me at regennia@gmail.com. For more information about Dr. Abbington’s GIA music series, please visit: http://www.giamusic.com/sacred_music/aacms.cfm.
About Dr. Regennia N. Williams, Founder, President, and Executive Director
Dr. Regennia N. Williams is the Founder and Executive Director of The RASHAD Center, Inc., a Maryland-based non-profit educational corporation.
Williams holds a PhD in Social History and Policy from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. A native Clevelander and a four-time alumna of Cleveland State University, information on RASHAD's “Praying Grounds, African American Faith Communities: A Documentary and Oral History” project is now available online at www.ClevelandMemory.org/pray/, a site that is maintained by CSU's Library Special Collections, home of the Praying Grounds manuscript collections. Praying Grounds was the primary inspiration for the launching of the Initiative for the Study of Religion and Spirituality in the History of Africa and the Diaspora (RASHAD) at CSU, and links to RASHAD's scholarly journal and newsletter are also available on the Praying Grounds site. On April 28, 2020, the RASHAD Center, Inc. became a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.
In 2010, Dr. Williams was a Visiting Fulbright Scholar at Nigeria’s Obafemi Awolowo University, where she taught history and directed a RASHAD-related oral history project that focused on the role of religion in recent Nigerian social history. Other research-related travels have taken her to Canada, China, France, South Africa, and Austria.
In 2013, she conceived and produced “Come Sunday @ 70: The Place of Duke Ellington’s Sacred Jazz in World History and Culture, c. 1943-2013,” a project that included scholarly presentations and performing arts activities. From September 1993 until May 2015, she was a faculty member in the Department of History at Cleveland State University. She served as a Fulbright Specialist at South Africa's University of the Free State in the summer of 2019, and completed a short-term faculty residency at Howard University in the fall of 2019. She is based in Cleveland, Ohio.
As a public scholar, her current research projects focus on African American history and culture, especially as it relates to music, religion, and spirituality. She is a member of the Oral History Association, the Western Reserve Historical Society, and the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
The RASHAD Center, Inc. 