The Exile’s Song: Édmond Dédé and the Unfinished Revolutions of the Atlantic World (Yale University Press, 2017) by Sally McKee, professor of history. In 1855, Dédé, a free black composer from New Orleans, emigrated to Paris. There he trained with France’s best classical musicians and went on to spend 36 years in Bordeaux leading the city’s most popular orchestras. Beginning with Dédé's birth in antebellum New Orleans in 1827 and ending with his death in Paris in 1901, McKee vividly recounts the life of this extraordinary man.

Sally McKee received her doctorate in 1993 at the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto. Trained as a medievalist, she now focuses on African- and European-Americans’ engagement with intellectual and cultural movements of the second half of the 19th and early 20th century. Her teaching introduces students to the convergence of cultures in the history of politics, art, religion, and food. She is active in UC Davis’s efforts to enhance the diversity and inclusion of its students and faculty.

My research has ranged across centuries. Originally a medievalist with a specialty in late medieval Venetian colonization, I now concentrate on the cultural history of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with an emphasis on jazz, modernism, and "primitivism." My book, The Exile's Song: Edmond Dédé and the Unfinished Revolutions of the Atlantic World (Yale, 2017), presents new archival material relating to Edmond Dédé, the African American composer from New Orleans, whose opera, Morgiane, ou le sultan d'Ispahan, will be presented in concert in New Orleans in Fall 2024, and then in New York and Washington, D.C. in early 2025, by Opera Crèole (NOLA) and Opera Lafayette (Washington, D.C.).

View the book at Yale University Press