The Wiles Lectures were founded in 1953 by Mrs Austen Boyd of Craigavad, Co. Down, in memory of her father, Thomas S. Wiles of Albany, New York. Mrs Boyd generously endowed a trust fund to support an annual series of lectures at Queen's University Belfast ‘to promote the study of the history of civilisation and to encourage the extension of historical thinking into the realm of general ideas’.

The fund brings to Belfast each year an expert in a particular field of historical scholarship to deliver four lectures on successive days, related to the lecturer's research and reflecting on the wider implications of their work for historical understanding.

The Wiles Trust also supports other scholarly activities at Queen's, including a series of Wiles Colloquia on historical topics, convened by members of School staff.

Janet Boyd and the Wiles Lectures

For more information, contact the Chair of Trustees, Prof. Peter Gray

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'

The lectures will be given in person on 24-27 May 2023

More details on this public lecture series will be posted here when available.

Barbara D. Savage is an historian and the Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought in the Department of Africana Studies of the University of Pennsylvania.  She was a member of the University’s History Department from 1995-2013. She was the Vyvyan Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History at the University of Oxford in 2018-19. She teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in twentieth century African American history; the history of American religious and social reform movements; the history of the relationship between media and politics; and black women’s political and intellectual history.

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 currently at work on an intellectual biography of Professor Merze Tate, an African American woman who pioneered in the fields of diplomatic history and international relations during her tenure at Howard University from 1942 to 1977.

All lectures are free and open to the public.

Please register here to attend