Lecture Series

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:

1982: Sir W. Arthur Lewis, Some Economic Aspects of Race Relations
1983: Mayor Maynard Jackson, Black Ballots and Southern Politics
1984: Judge A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., The Legitimization of Racism
1986: Marian Wright Edelman, American Families in Crisis: What Can Be Done?
1987: Ambassador Donald F. McHenry, The Great Powers and the Third World
1992: Cornel West, Being and Blackness: The Struggle Against Nobodiness
1993: Hazel Carby, Genealogies of Race, Nation, and Manhood
1994: Stuart Hall, Race, Ethnicity, Nation: The Faithful/Fatal Triangle
1995: Barbara Fields, Humane Letters: The Arts and Duty of the Word
1998: Arnold Rampersad, Satan and The Souls of Black Folk
1999: Homi Bhabha, "Quasi-Colonial": Reflections in the Spirit of W. E. B. Du Bois
2000: Glenn Loury, The Economics and Ethics of Racial Classification
2001: Brent Staples, Excavating Race in Mongrel America
2002: John H. McWhorter, African American Experience: Responses to Adversity, Then and Now
2003: Sidney W. Mintz, Three Ancient Colonies: Caribbean Themes and Variations
2004: Manning Marable, Living Black History
2005: Paul Gilroy, On The Moral Economy of Blackness in The Twentieth Century

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 America Studies and as Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African America 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:

1998: Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres, The Miner's Canary
1999: Thomas Holt, The Problem of Race in the 21st Century
2001: Waldo Martin, Black Liberation, Black Culture, and the Making of America: 1945-1980
2002: David Brion Davis, Challenging Boundaries: A Macro, Micro, Macro View of American Slavery
2003: Robin D.G. Kelley, Speaking in Tongues: Jazz and Modern Africa
2004: Leon F. Litwack, Stormy Monday: Black Southerners in the Twentieth Century
2004: Gary Nash, African Americans in the Age of Revolution

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:

1995: Wole Soyinka, Nigeria: The Open Sorrow of a Continent
1998: Chinua Achebe, Home and Exile
2000: Ali A. Mazrui, The African Condition and the American Experience
2001: Francis Abiola Irele, Black Utopia: Diaspora Thought and African Renewal
2001: Francis Abiola Irele, Black Utopia: Diaspora Thought and African Renewal
2003: Charlayne Hunter-Gault, New News Out of Africa
2004: Emmanuel Obiechina, Africa in the Soul: What We Should Learn from the Narratives of the African Slaves on the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
2005: March 14-16: N'gugi wa Thiongo, Topic TBA
2006: N'gugi wa Thiongo, Remembering Africa: Burial and Resurrection of African Memory

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 America Studies, the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African America 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:

2001: Darryl Pinckney, Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature
2002: Manthia Diawara, Bamako
2003: Gerald. L. Early, The Next Level of the Game: Cultural Observations on Three African-American Athletes
2004: Dwight Andrews, Giant Steps: Formations of a Black Music Aesthetic
2005: Melvin Van Peebles, Connecting the Dots/A La Barbershop
2006: April 18-20: Paule Marshall , Topic TBA
2006: Paule Marshall, People and Places in the Life of a Writer
2006: Walter Mosley, Street Philosophy by Socrates Fortlow