Christopher J. Wells is assistant professor of musicology at Arizona State University's School of Music and managing editor of the Journal of Jazz Studies. He received his doctorate in 2014 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where his dissertation on drummer/bandleader Chick Webb and swing music in Harlem during the Great Depression received the Society for American Music’s Wiley Housewright Dissertation Award and UNC’s Glen Haydon Award for an Outstanding Dissertation in Musicology. He has also received Videmus’s Edgar A. Toppin Award for Outstanding Research in African American Music and a Morroe Berger/Benny Carter Jazz Research Fellowship from the Institute of Jazz Studies. A social jazz dancer for over a decade, Professor Wells is currently writing a book about the history of jazz music’s ever-shifting relationship with popular dance and has a chapter in the recently published in the "Oxford Handbook of Dance and Ethnicity."