Major Lecture Series

Our four endowed lecture series feature renowned scholars in the field of African and African American Studies.  Lecturers present new original work which they unfold to the Harvard community over three consecutive evenings.  The talks are then published as monographs through Harvard University Press, Oxford Press, or Basic/Civitas Books, a member of Perseus Books Group.  Further details on the Du Bois, Huggins, Locke, and McMillan-Stewart lectures follow below.  Streaming videos of recent lectures are available here.

 W. E. B. Du Bois Lectures

The W. E. B. Du Bois Lectures were established in 1981 with funding from the Ford Foundation. Now sponsored by Harvard University Press, these lectures recognize persons of outstanding achievement who have contributed to our better understanding of African American life, history, and culture.

Previous W. E. B. Du Bois Lectures include the following:

2009: Michael C. Dawson, Blacks In and Out of the Left: Past, Present and Future
2009: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Du Bois at Large
2009: Robert Stepto, Reading the Classics in the Age of Obama
2009: Melissa Harris-Lacewell, Of the Meaning of Progress: Measuring Black Citizenship
2009: Joseph Miller, African and World History
2008: Mahmood Mamdani, Beyond Settlers and Natives
2008: Michael Eric Dyson, Obama and the Presidential Election
2007: Kenneth W. Warren, What Was African American Literature?
2007: Robert Farris Thompson, The Grand Kongo Tradition: Art Histories of Ecstasy and Law
2006: George Fredrickson, Big Enough to be Inconsistent: Slavery and Race in the Thought and Politics of Abraham Lincoln
2006: Paul Gilroy, On The Moral Economy of Blackness in The Twenty-first Century
2004: Manning Marable, Living Black History
2003: Sidney W. Mintz, Three Ancient Colonies: Caribbean Themes and Variations
2002: John H. McWhorter, African American Experience: Responses to Adversity, Then and Now
2001: Brent Staples, Excavating Race in Mongrel America
2000: Glenn Loury, The Economics and Ethics of Racial Classification
1999: Homi Bhabha, "Quasi-Colonial": Reflections in the Spirit of W. E. B. Du Bois
1998: Arnold Rampersad, Satan and The Souls of Black Folk
1995: Barbara Fields, Humane Letters: The Arts and Duty of the Word
1994: Stuart Hall, Race, Ethnicity, Nation: The Faithful/Fatal Triangle
1993: Hazel Carby, Genealogies of Race, Nation, and Manhood
1992: Cornel West, Being and Blackness: The Struggle Against Nobodiness
1987: Ambassador Donald F. McHenry, The Great Powers and the Third World
1986: Marian Wright Edelman, American Families in Crisis: What Can Be Done?
1984: Judge A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., The Legitimization of Racism
1983: Mayor Maynard Jackson, Black Ballots and Southern Politics
1982: Sir W. Arthur Lewis, Some Economic Aspects of Race Relations

Nathan I. Huggins Lectures

The Nathan I. Huggins Lectures were established by friends and colleagues of Nathan I. Huggins, the distinguished historian and first occupant of the W. E. B. Du Bois Professorship at Harvard University. Professor Huggins served as Chair of the Department of African and African American Studies and as Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research until his untimely death in 1989. The purpose of this series is to bring distinguished scholars from this country or from abroad to deliver a series of three lectures focusing on topics related to African American history. The series is co-sponsored by the Harvard University Press, which publishes a book based on each Huggins lecture series.

Previous Huggins Lectures include the following:

2009: Peter H. Wood, Into the Light: Liberating Winslow Homer’s ‘Near Andersonville’
2009: Neil Foley, Jim Crow Good Neighbors: The Failed Promise of Black-Brown Solidarity
2009: Paul Finkelman, The Supreme Court and the Peculiar Institution: Marshall, Story, Taney and the Defense of Slavery
2008: Richard Alba, Blurring the Color Line: Possibilities for Ethno-Racial Change in Early Twenty-first Century America
2007: Steven Hahn, The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom
2007: Darlene Clark Hine, Rehearsal for Freedom in Black Country: Three Women Performing Race, Class, Gender in South Carolina, 1870-1954
2004: Gary Nash, African Americans in the Age of Revolution
2004: Leon F. Litwack, Stormy Monday: Black Southerners in the Twentieth Century
2003: Robin D.G. Kelley, Speaking in Tongues: Jazz and Modern Africa
2002: David Brion Davis, Challenging Boundaries: A Macro, Micro, Macro View of American Slavery
2001: Waldo Martin, Black Liberation, Black Culture, and the Making of America: 1945-1980
1999: Thomas Holt, The Problem of Race in the 21st Century
1998: Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres, The Miner's Canary

McMillan-Stewart Lectures

The McMillan-Stewart Lectures were established in 1996 to honor Ms. Genevieve McMillan of Cambridge and her colleague, Ms. Reba Stewart, who died an untimely death while working as a painter in Liberia and Ghana as a young woman. Ms. McMillan, who has endowed this lecture series as part of the W. E. B. Du Bois Fellowship Program, hopes that the lectures will advance knowledge of the field of African studies. The series of three lectures is co-sponsored by the Oxford University Press, which publishes them as books.

Previous McMillan-Stewart Lectures include the following:

2008: Jean-Godefroy Bidima, Poetics and Politics of Hermeneutics: Crossings and Becomings in Ethics, Politics and Aesthetics in Africa
2006: Maryse Conde, Rediscovering the Self in Francophone Literature: The Erasure of Memory and the Rebellious Presence of Africa
2006: N'gugi wa Thiongo, Remembering Africa: Burial and Resurrection of African Memory
2004: Emmanuel Obiechina, Africa in the Soul: Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century African Slave Narratives
2003: Charlayne Hunter-Gault, New News Out of Africa
2001: Francis Abiola Irele, Black Utopia: Diaspora Thought and African Renewal
2000: Ali A. Mazrui, The African Predicament and the American Experience
1998: Chinua Achebe, Home and Exile
1995: Wole Soyinka, Nigeria: The Open Sorrow of a Continent

Alain LeRoy Locke Lectures

The Alain LeRoy Locke Lectures are named after the godfather of the Harlem Renaissance, Alain LeRoy Locke (1885-1954). These lectures are intended to honor the memory and contributions of this noted Harvard scholar, who became the first and, until 1963, the only African American to win a Rhodes Scholarship to the University of Oxford. Co-sponsored by the Department of African and African American Studies, the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, and Basic/Civitas Books, a member of Perseus Books Group, this series was established to bring a distinguished person to deliver three lectures on a topic related to the field of African American culture and history.

Previous Alain LeRoy Locke Lectures include the following:

2009: Kobena Mercer, Recrossings: Three Nineteenth-Century Black Atlantic Artists
2008: David Adjaye, Adjaye Associates Work
2008: Deborah Willis, Concepts of Beauty
2008: Anthony Davis, Deconstructing Opera, Creating Opera in a Post-Colonial World
2007: Paul Oliver, Proto-Blues: Secular Black Music Recorded in the Field
2006: Paule Marshall, People and Places in the Life of a Writer
2006: Walter Mosley, Street Philosophy by Socrates Fortlow
2005: Melvin Van Peebles, Connecting the Dots A La Barbershop
2004: Dwight Andrews, Giant Steps: Formations of a Black Music Aesthetic
2003: Gerald. L. Early, The Next Level of the Game: Cultural Observations on Three African American Athletes
2002: Elvis Mitchell, African Americans in Cinema: From Pride to Rage
2002: Manthia Diawara, Bamako
2001: Darryl Pinckney, Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature