Marshall Stearns

Marshall Winslow Stearns was a scholar, collector and institution founder whose work established jazz and vernacular dance as subjects for academic research and public history. Trained in medieval English literature at Harvard and Yale, Stearns taught at Hunter College while building a parallel career as a jazz historian at a moment when universities rarely recognized the field as serious intellectual work.

In 1952, Stearns founded the Institute of Jazz Studies in his Greenwich Village apartment, opening the collection to researchers weekly and gradually assembling recordings, books, correspondence, research files and artifacts into scholarly infrastructure. He published *The Story of Jazz* in 1956 and developed public lectures that paired historical explanation with living performance. His collaborations with Savoy Ballroom veterans Al Minns and Leon James proved especially important: the dancers appeared as expert performers and informants whose demonstrations preserved movement knowledge through television programs and lecture-demonstrations including appearances on *Playboy's Penthouse* and *DuPont Show of the Week*.

During the 1960s, Marshall and Jean Stearns assembled a wide-ranging history of American vernacular dance, drawing on interviews, research files, scripts, photographs and recordings held in the institute's collection. Jean was a research partner and co-author whose contribution shaped the project throughout. Their work connected African American social dance, tap, stage specialties, jazz music, film and Broadway across many generations and media.

Stearns died in December 1966 before the project reached publication. Macmillan published *Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance* posthumously in 1968 under both Marshall and Jean Stearns' names. The book made vernacular dance research legible to broad audiences and preserved interviews and pathways among forms that might otherwise have been lost. Later scholarship has identified limitations in the work—uneven attribution, errors, and the particular perspective of a white scholar mediating Black vernacular history—but the foundational research remains significant.

The Institute of Jazz Studies moved to Rutgers–Newark after Stearns's death and grew into a major jazz archive. His lasting contribution is therefore double: a book that opened vernacular dance to wider scholarly attention, and an institution that preserved source materials allowing later scholars to test, correct and expand the historical record.