About this Event
This talk focuses on the black historical tradition in the United States and the lessons it offers for addressing current threats to the study, preservation, and teaching of black history. Professor Jarvis Givens situates this discussion by attending to the convergence of the 250th anniversary of US independence and the 100th anniversary since the inauguration of Negro History Week in February 1926, which has been celebrated as Black History Month since 1976–a convergence occurring at a time when the teaching of black history is being widely contested in the United States via executive orders by the US president and the passing of state laws that restrict what can be taught about the past in schools, universities, and public history sites. Using the 100-year journey of Black History Month as a lens, Givens identifies what’s politically at stake in “black memory work,” and more importantly, what can be done to preserve and expand this critically important intellectual tradition despite powerful efforts to the contrary.
Jarvis R. Givens is a professor of education and African & African American Studies at Harvard University, and he is currently a Leverhulme Visiting Professor at University College London’s Institute of the Americas. He is the author of four books, Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching (2021), School Clothes: A Collective Memoir of Black Student Witness (2023), American Grammar: Race, Education and the Building of a Nation (2025), and I’ll Make Me a World: The 100-Year Journey of Black History Month (2026). He is also the co-founding faculty director of the Black Teacher Archive at Harvard. Givens’s work has been published in various outlets, including American Education Research Journal, Journal of African American History, Harvard Educational Review, The Atlantic, The Boston Globe, and more.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
UCL Institute of Advanced Studies, Common Ground, G11, Gower Street, London, United Kingdom
GBP 0.00
