W. E. B. Du Bois Lectures

The W. E. B. Du Bois Lectures were established in 1981 with funding from the Ford Foundation. These lectures recognize persons of outstanding achievement who have contributed to the understanding of African and African American life, history, and culture. Previous speakers have included Danielle Allen, K. Anthony Appiah, Homi K. Bhabha, Hazel Carby, Stephen L. Carter, Stuart Hall, Michael Hanchard, Judge A. Leon Higginbotham, Glenn C. Loury, Julianne Malveaux, Manning Marable, John McWhorter, Sidney Mintz, Brent Staples, and Cornel West.

Order W. E. B. Du Bois Lectures Published by Harvard University Press

  • 2017: Michael A. Gomez, West Africa in the Age of Ascent
  • 2016: Danielle Allen, Cuz, or the Life and Times of Michael A (1979-2009)
  • 2015: Brent H. Edwards, Black Radicalism and the Archive
  • 2014: Hortense Spillers, Women and the Early Republics: Revolution, Sentiment, and Sorrow
  • 2014: Michael Hanchard, Race, Politics and the Constitution of Difference
  • 2012: Ernest J. Wilson III, Exclusion and Inequality in Digital Societies: Theories, Evidence, and Strategy
  • 2012: Sarah Tishkoff, The Genomics of African American Ancestry
  • 2011: Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., Pragmatic Reconstruction: The Prophetic, the Heroic, and the Democratic
  • 2011: Kimberlé Crenshaw, Racing to Postracialism
  • 2010: Condoleezza Rice, American Foreign Policy and the Black Experience
  • 2010: Kwame Anthony Appiah, The World, The Negro, and Africa: Themes in the Thought of W. E. B. Du Bois
  • 2010: W. J. T. Mitchell, Teachable Moments: Race, Media & Visual Culture
  • 2010: Martin L. Kilson, Jr., Transformational Dynamics in the 20th Century Black Intelligentsia
  • 2009: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Du Bois at Large
  • 2009: Michael C. Dawson, Blacks In and Out of the Left: Past, Present and Future
  • 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