The Department of Africana Studies will host the Annual Shirley Graham DuBois '34 '35 Lecture Series March 16-18 featuring Dr. Natanya Duncan, Associate Professor of History and Chair of Africana Studies at Queens College (CUNY) on Monday, March 16, and Dr. Carole Boyce Davies, Chair of the English Department at Howard University and H.T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters emerita and Professor of Africana Studies and Literatures in English at Cornell University, on Wednesday, March 18. These scholar activists will discuss how Black women, at the highest levels of leadership in the United States, Europe, Africa, South America, and the Caribbean, create sustainable movements, model innovative and pioneering political action, and offer strategic alternatives to traditional male leadership.
Shirley Graham DuBois was a composer, playwright, biographer, nation builder, and activist. She was one of the first Black women to stage an opera in the United States and one of the earliest African-American women musicologists. Graham DuBois earned her BA in 1934 and completed her MA from Oberlin College and Conservatory in 1935. Her thesis, "The Survival of Africanisms in Modern Music," argued that European music was influenced by African music. In 1932, while she was still a student at Oberlin, the Cleveland Stadium Opera Company premiered Du Bois's three-act opera Tom Tom before a weekend crowd of more than 25,000. After multiple appointments, including Field Secretary of the NAACP, she married sociologist W.E.B. DuBois in 1951. Together, they emigrated to Ghana in 1961, renouncing their United States citizenship. In Ghana, they worked closely with Kwame Nkrumah, the first President after independence. Graham DuBois was the first director of the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation (1965).
Africana Studies will host lunchtime workshops with students on March 16 and faculty on March 18 at 12:30 pm in King Building Room 123.
Please email ascott4@oberlin.edu to register.
Open to all members of the public
