Polymathic Pizza: Memory and Place

Robeson Taj Frazier is an associate professor of communication and director of IDEA (the Institute for Diversity and Empowerment at Annenberg). He is the author of two books, a multimedia/film producer, and has published articles and essays about U.S. Black social movements and political ideologies, globalization, fine arts, popular culture, and U.S.-China relations and cultural contact.

His most recent work, KAOS Theory: The Afrokosmic Ark of Ben Caldwell (Angel City Press, 2023), is a book and media arts platform that explores the creative contributions and philosophical insights of Los Angeles filmmaker and multimedia artist Ben Caldwell and the community arts organization he founded, KAOS Network. Frazier’s first book, The East is Black: Cold War China in the Black Radical Imagination (Duke University Press, 2014), analyzes the political and cultural ties cultivated between China and U.S. Black political movements during the Cold War, and the role that travel, media and representation played in this process. His second project, It’s Yours: A Story About Hip Hop and the Internet (2019), is a documentary film that examines how hip-hop artists’ and the broader global hip-hop community’s use of the Internet and digital technologies has revolutionized the music industry and global youth culture.

Frazier obtained his BA in Africana studies and international relations at the University of Pennsylvania and his PhD in African Diaspora studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Before joining USC Annenberg, he taught at New York University, Princeton University, and CUNY-Bronx Community College; served as a history, arts, and culture instructor in Oakland and New York City public schools; and created music and performed as an emcee/rapper, independently releasing two albums and a mixtape. 

As the divisional dean for the social sciences, William Deverell helps coordinate strategic planning in research and faculty recruitment and retention across social science departments and programs. He is an American historian with a focus on the nineteenth and twentieth century American West and has appointments in the USC Dornsife Van Hunnick Department of History; Spatial Sciences Institute; and Environmental Studies Program. He has written works on political, social, ethnic, and environmental history. He is the founding director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West. He is one of founding directors of the Los Angeles Service Academy, a high school outreach initiative that teaches high school students about the infrastructural networks of Southern California. He also directs the USC Libraries Collections Convergence Initiative. His graduate students at USC work on a variety of topics on the history of the West, ranging from the region’s racial and ethnic history, to the rise of conservative politics in the Southwest, and the western U.S. connections to and across the Pacific Rim. Current projects include the Chinatown History Project and the West on Fire Initiative.