Rory James Corbett is a PhD candidate in the Department of Music at Maynooth University, where he is currently completing his doctoral thesis. Rory’s research explores the cultural symbiosis which took place between Irish, African American and blackface minstrel music in the circum-Atlantic world of the early nineteenth century and the pivotal role that Irish Americans played in popularising the African American banjo therein. His article “‘Backside Albany’ Trickster’s Spirit and the Axial Moment of Blackface Minstrelsy” was recently published in the International Political Anthropology Journal. Rory is also a musician and recently completed a dissertation for his Masters degree in Ethnomusicology in which he reconnected his own creative practice as a practitioner of the African American clawhammer banjo style with that of the earliest Irish American blackface minstrel performers.