• Royce Fellowship
Jeremy
Derfner

Concentration 

History

Award Year 

1998

Jeremy will study the social history of black Kansas City in the 1930s. His research, the foundation for his honors thesis, focuses on how and why a thriving black culture was rooted in the popular folk cultures of jazz music and Negro League baseball.

Jeremy is the Adult Education Team Co-Chair and a chief staff writer at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, where he is on leave from a PhD program in American History at Columbia University. Prior to beginning graduate school, he was a journalist in Washington, DC, first at The American Prospect and then at Slate.