Stephen Stacks earned his PhD in Musicology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was awarded a Royster Society Fellowship for his dissertation on civil rights freedom singing in U.S. culture. While at UNC he also wrote a Master’s Thesis on progressive bluegrass and was active in graduate student leadership. Before UNC, he received a Master’s in Choral Conducting from Boston University, where he studied with Ann Howard Jones and Scott Allen Jarrett, and a Bachelor’s Degree in Church Music from Furman University, where he studied conducting with Bing Vick and voice with Bruce Schoonmaker.

Dr. Stacks is the author of The Resounding Revolution: Freedom Song after 1968 from the University of Illinois Press. The book rethinks the contested legacy and continuing importance of the music of the Civil Rights/Black Freedom Movement after 1968. Conventional understandings of freedom song cast it as a circumscribed repertoire, tether it to the classical phase of the Civil Rights Movement (1954-1968) and the philosophy of nonviolence, and downplay its continued significance after 1968. In fact, freedom song—anthems and spirituals such as We Shall Overcome and This Little Light of Mine that accompanied meetings, protest actions, and marches during the Civil Rights Movement—became a vital, contested music after 1968, a site to challenge the memory of the earlier years of the Movement, and debate the resonance of the Movement in the present. Drawing from ethnography, archival research, music/media analysis, and historiographical interrogation the book demonstrates that freedom song is not a static repertoire for a social movement that ended fifty years ago, but a living tradition that provides fertile ground for constructing collective memory, crafting political identity, and leveraging capital in contemporary struggles for freedom.

In addition to the monograph, his scholarship has led to numerous presentations at national and international conferences and several shorter publications. Most notably, he authored a colloquy piece on antiracist pedagogy and an article on Bernice Johnson Reagon’s musical coalition politics, both published in the Journal of the Society for American Music. Dr. Stacks is also in the early stages of a second book project, which will examine musical collaboration between American Indians and other people in the U.S. This project will examine the complexity of interracial coalition building, identity negotiation, and music-making from an indigenous standpoint.

As a pedagogue, Dr. Stacks is versatile and is committed to the growth and wellbeing of his students. He has taught a wide variety of courses at both UNC Chapel Hill and North Carolina Central University. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Music at NCCU, where he teaches for the Music and Language and Literature Departments.