Barbara D. Savage is an historian at the University of Pennsylvania and Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought in the Department of Africana Studies where she served as inaugural chair. She also was a member of Penn’s History Department from 1995-2013. She was the Vyvyan Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History at the University of Oxford in 2018-19 and remains a Distinguished Fellow at its Rothermere American Institute.

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 also the author of Merze Tate: The Global Odyssey of a Black Woman Scholar (forthcoming, Yale University Press, fall, 2023). This book is an intellectual biography of Tate, an overlooked African American professor who published groundbreaking work in the fields of diplomatic history and international relations during her tenure at Howard University from 1942 to 1977. Trained at Oxford and Harvard, her five books and many articles address the topics of arms control, and race and imperialism in Hawaii, the Pacific, and Africa. 

Wed. 24 May at 5 pm. Larmor Lecture Theatre, Physics Building.

“The Prometheans” - On African American Military Service.

Tate came of age as a teenager during World War I and learned then the paradoxes of black military service and US racial politics, not least because members of her family were war veterans.  That informed her work on race and anti-imperialism as did her teaching of Howard students who were sent off to WWII, Korea, and Viet Nam. Despite the continued over-representation of black men and women in the US armed forces, military history remains an understudied aspect of black political and cultural history.  It is a topic rich in possibilities, including attention to tensions between racial, gender, and national identity in a field that critiques US imperialism and state-sanctioned violence at home and abroad.

Thurs. 25 May at 5 pm. Larmor Lecture Theatre, Physics Building.

“The Darker Peoples of the World” - On South Asia and African Americans

When Tate applied for a Fulbright in 1950, she requested to go to India where she was assigned to Tagore’s world university at Visva-Bharati. African American religious intellectuals had traveled to India starting in the 1930s, but she went instead as a scholar eager to teach international relations and geopolitics. Attention to that region in African American political thought centers on Martin Luther King, Jr.’s embrace of Gandhi’s nonviolent tactics, leaving a longer and broader set of interactions understudied. Tate’s travels in India and Asia and her writings remind us of the idealization of India’s independence (which preceded that of most African nations) while raising broader questions about the place of “the East” in Black American political ideas about a post-colonial world.

Fri. 26 May at 5 pm. Larmor Lecture Theatre, Physics Building.

“Journey for a Purpose” - On Africa and African Americans

Ideas about Africa rest at the very core of African American history and political thought.  By the time Tate was able to visit Africa in the mid-1970s, she had written and taught for decades about British and European imperialism there.  In the decades that followed, significant increases in African immigration to the US and the UK complicate questions of racial, ethnic, national identity, and political solidarity.  The fields of African American history and Black British Studies need to address these demographic shifts, including attention to an Indian/African diaspora which not only includes Kamala Harris in the US, but Rishi Sunak, Humza Yousaf, and Suella Braverman in the UK.

 Sat. 27 May at 11 am. Larmor Lecture Theatre, Physics Building.

“Living History” - On Black Women’s Lives

Towards the end of her life, 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 modern black womanhood which had begun in the 1930s.  Looking backwards at her own life and those she interviewed raises questions about the ways that the genre of intellectual biography can unsettle prevailing historical narratives, but also about the intersections of race, class, gender for the generation of women whose lives spanned the twentieth century but pre-dated the contemporary analytic language of black feminism.