Join Professor Barbara Savage at the Rothermere American institute for a line-up of stellar scholars who bring innovative approaches to writing about black women’s lives. This intergenerational and international group will challenge us to re-consider links between biography and history in American, African American, African, and African diasporic studies. We will highlight lessons learned from prize-winning biographical work while showcasing new scholarship in the growing field of black women’s biographical studies.
Studying black women’s lives requires us to revise and expand scholarly tropes, whether on slavery, migration, politics, religion, transnationalism, or knowledge and artistic production. The capaciousness, complexity, and contradictions within those lives also often require inventions of new forms of writing and new categories of analysis.
The day’s format will encourage informal discussions among participants and the audience.
A provisional programme will be available shortly.
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Speakers
Mia Bay (Pennsylvania)
https://www.history.upenn.edu/people/faculty/mia-bay
To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells (2009).
Judith Casselberry (Bowdoin)
https://www.bowdoin.edu/profiles/faculty/jcasselb/index.html
The Labor of Faith: Gender and Power in Black Apostolic Pentacostalism (2017) and new work on the life and religious roots of the performer Grace Jones.
Erica Armstrong Dunbar (Rutgers)
https://history.rutgers.edu/faculty-directory/788-dunbar-erica-armstrong
Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave (2017).
Merve Fejzula (Cambridge)
https://www.hist.cam.ac.uk/directory/merve-fejzula
New work on women and Anglophone dissemination of negritude in Nigeria and the United States.
Farah Jasmine Griffin (Columbia)
http://iraas.columbia.edu/about/farah-jasmine-griffin
If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday (2001) and Harlem Nocturne: Women Artists and Progressive Politics During World War II (2013).
Sinead McEneaney (Open University)
http://www.open.ac.uk/research/people/sm43588
Writing rights: autobiography, protest and civil rights women.
Imaobong Umoren (London School of Economics)
http://www.lse.ac.uk/International-History/People/academicStaff/umoren/umoren
Race Women Internationalists: Activist-Intellectuals and Global Freedom Struggles (2018) and new work on Eugenia Charles, Prime Minister of Dominica.
