The Wiles Lectures 2023 will be given by Professor Barbara Savage, University of Pennsylvania

on the topic: 'Uncharted Territory:  The Future of African American History'

These four public lectures will be given in person on 24-27 May 2023.

Barbara D. Savage is an historian at the University of Pennsylvania and Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought in the Department of Africana Studies where she served as inaugural chair. She also was a member of Penn’s History Department from 1995-2013. She was the Vyvyan Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History at the University of Oxford in 2018-19 and remains a Distinguished Fellow at its Rothermere American Institute.

Her book, Your Spirits Walk Beside Us: The Politics of Black Religion (Harvard University Press, 2008), is an historical examination of debates about the public responsibility of black churches and the role of religion in racial leadership. That book was the winner of the prestigious 2012 Grawemeyer Prize in Religion. She also is the author of Broadcasting Freedom: Radio, War, and the Politics of Race, 1938-1948 (University of North Carolina Press, 1999) which won the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library Award for the best book in American history in the period 1916-1966. In addition, she is co-editor of Women and Religion in the African Diaspora (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006) with R. Marie Griffith.

Savage is also the author of Merze Tate: The Global Odyssey of a Black Woman Scholar (forthcoming, Yale University Press, fall, 2023). This book is an intellectual biography of Tate, an overlooked African American professor who published groundbreaking work in the fields of diplomatic history and international relations during her tenure at Howard University from 1942 to 1977. Trained at Oxford and Harvard, her five books and many articles address the topics of arms control, and race and imperialism in Hawaii, the Pacific, and Africa. 

No registration required.

More details here