We are happy to announce our Shirley Graham DuBois '34 '35 Lecture Series event, just in time for Women's History Month. 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 black women musicologists. Graham DuBois earned her BA in 1934 and completed her MA from Oberlin College in 1935. Her thesis, "The Survival of Africanisms in Modern Music" argued that European music was influenced by African music. In 1932, while 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. In 1951, she married sociologist W. E. B DuBois. Together, they immigrated to Ghana in 1961, renouncing their United States citizenship. In Ghana, they worked closely with Kwame NKrumah, the first President of an independent Ghana. Graham DuBois was the first director of the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation (1965).
This year, the Africana Studies Shirley Graham DuBois Lecture Series features 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, aNatanya Duncan, Associate Professor of History and Chair of Africana Studies at Queens College (CUNY). Dr. Carole Boyce-Davies and Dr. Natanya Duncan have spent their careers studying how Black women have challenged power and created safe spaces for Black people in the 19th-21st centuries. These Scholar-Activist-Artists will discuss how Black women, at the highest levels of leadership in the United States, Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean, created sustainable movements, model innovative and pioneering political action, and offer strategic alternatives to traditional male leadership.
Africana Studies will host lunchtime workshops with students on March 16 and 18.
Open to all members of the Oberlin campus community
