Book your space at the fourth and final lecture on our ‘Uncovering Women’s History’ series here.
Barbara D. Savage is an historian from the University of Pennsylvania and the Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought in the Department of Africana Studies. In 2018-19, she was the Vyvyan Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History at the University of Oxford.
Her most recent book ‘Merze Tate: the Global Odyssey of a Black Woman Scholar’ won the 2024 Association for the Study of African American Life and History’s Best Book Award and the 2024 Darlene Clark Hine Award from the Organization of American Historians for the Best Book in Black Women’s History.
In this lecture, Professor Barbara Savage will explore Merze Tate and modern black womanhood. She says;
“In the 1930s, the black woman scholar Merze Tate began to develop her ideas about modern black womanhood. In the 1970s, nearing the end of her career, Tate served as both an interviewer and an interviewee for Harvard’s Black Womens Oral History Project, a still-invaluable resource in African American and women’s history. That work brought full circle Tate’s ideas about black women’s lives. Looking at her life and those of the women she interviewed raises questions about the ways that intellectual biography can trouble and unsettle prevailing historical narratives, including about modern black women.”
