Professor Merze Tate and Black Women’s Intellectual History – In conversation with Professor Barbara D. Savage

Event

Merze Tate whilst studying at Oxford

The first of the Hall’s ‘in conversation’ series, Professor Wes Williams talks to Professor Barbara D. Savage about Professor Merze Tate and Black Women’s Intellectual History. This event is hosted by the Principal of St Edmund Hall, Professor Katherine J. Willis.

About the Speaker

Professor Barbara D. Savage is a scholar of twentieth century African American history with a focus on political and intellectual history, religious history, and women’s history. She is the author of: Your Spirits Walk Beside Us: The Politics of Black Religion (Harvard, 2008), which won the prestigious 2012 Grawemeyer Prize in Religion and Broadcasting Freedom: Radio, War, and the Politics of Race, 1938-1948 (UNC, 1999) which won the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library Book Award. Her co-edited works are: Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women (UNC, 2015) and Women and Religion in the African Diaspora (Johns Hopkins, 2006). She is currently working on a biography of Merze Tate, a pioneering black woman diplomatic historian and faculty member at Howard University from 1942-1977.

Professor Savage holds a B.A. from the University of Virginia, a law degree from Georgetown, and a Ph.D. in history from Yale and was the Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought at the University of Pennsylvania and chair of its Department of Africana Studies and Oxford University’s visiting Harmsworth Professor in 2018.

In 2020 the first recipient of Oxford’s Barbara Savage Prize for best thesis in Black History was awarded to Sophie Gunning for her thesis ‘A Taste of Freedom?’

Professor Savage writes: ‘The new Black History Thesis Prize is a step toward making this field more visible at Oxford.  Black history offers opportunities for exciting new research across time and space.  The prize also signals that Black lives mattered in the past, too.  History always teaches us about the present.  We cannot understand the nexus between racial legacies of the past and the pressing current moment without knowing that history.

I am excited that the prize will encourage Oxford students to explore black history with the creativity and commitment I saw during my time there as Harmsworth Professor in 2018-2019. It honours the field in which I work and am humbled that it bears my name.’

You must register in order to receive the Zoom joining link by 17:00 on the day before the talk.

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Please note that this lecture will be recorded and published on St Edmund Hall’s digital and print communication platforms where appropriate.