My research explores the intersections of race, ethnicity, literature, and performance. My current book project, This Feeling Tone: The Performance of Black and Jewish Conversation, offers a cultural history of cross-diasporic collaboration in the post-war era. I center six key 20th century American artists by listening closely to recorded conversations and their collaborative poetic and dramatic artworks. I pair them as follows: Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich; Anna Deavere Smith and Studs Terkel; and George C. Wolfe and Tony Kushner. These artists worked with each other but also politicized conversation as an aesthetic form, one necessarily inscribed by complex, yet unequal, power relations. My approach—which traverses Literary, Sound, Performance and American Studies—aims to make such relations more perceptible.