Please join us for a one-day symposium featuring stellar scholars who bring innovative approaches to writing about black women’s lives. This intergenerational and international group will challenge us to re-consider links between biography and history in American, African American, African, and African diasporic studies. We will highlight lessons learned from prize-winning biographical work while showcasing new scholarship in the growing field of black women’s biographical studies.

Studying black women’s lives requires us to revise and expand scholarly tropes, whether on slavery, migration, politics, religion, transnationalism, or knowledge and artistic production. The capaciousness, complexity, and contradictions within those lives also often require inventions of new forms of writing and new categories of analysis.

The day’s format will encourage informal discussions among participants and the audience.

Programme is available here: www.rai.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/rai/documents/media/2018.05.15_-_writing_black_womens_lives_programme.pdf