A distinguished historian will trace the history of black capitalism in a lecture at UT Monday, November 9.
Juliet Walker will deliver a lecture titled “When Will All Black Economic Lives Matter? After 400 Years, 1619–2019, We Are Still at the Racial Bottom” at 3:30 p.m. in the Lindsay Young Auditorium of John C. Hodges Library. The lecture is free and open to the public.
Walker is a professor of history and founder and director of the Center for Black Business History, Entrepreneurship and Technology at the University of Texas at Austin.
In her lecture, Walker will trace the history of black capitalism beginning with pre-colonial African American business culture to the present. Her groundbreaking book The History of Black Business in America: Capitalism, Race, Entrepreneurship (1998) is the most comprehensive study on the contributions of black Americans to capitalism.
Through cutting-edge scholarship, Walker has been recognized as the foremost authority on African-American business history in the United States. She has received national fellowships and awards including a Senior Fulbright Fellowship for teaching and research in South Africa in 1995. In 2012, she held the position of Distinguished Visiting Professor of History at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado.
In 2010, the Association for the Study of African American Life and History presented Walker with its Carter G. Woodson Scholars Medallion, awarded annually to a scholar with a demonstrated record of at a least a decade in “research, writing, and activism” about the African-American experience.
More recently, Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis awarded Walker with the inaugural Madame C. J. Walker Lifetime Achievement Award as part of the Madame C. J. Walker/Frederick Douglass Annual Lecture Series.
Walker is one of ten UT Humanities Center visiting scholars who will be speaking this year. The remaining guest speakers in the lecture series are:
- January 14—Martin Kern, Greg and Joanna Zeluck Professor in Asian Studies, Princeton University, “The Origins of Chinese Poetry”
- February 11—Akeel Bilgrami, Sidney Morgenbesser Professor of Philosophy, Columbia University, “Agency, Value and Alienation”
- February 22—Daniel O’Quinn, professor, School of English and Theatre, University of Guelph, “Shylocks: Anti-Semitism, Pugilism and the Repertoire of Theatrical Violence”
- March 21—Kenneth Pomeranz, University Professor of History, University of Chicago, “Late Imperial Legacies: Land, Water and Long-Run Economic Development in China”
- March 28—Helmut Reimitz, professor of history, Princeton University, “On the Use and Abuse of the Roman Past in the Early Medieval West”
- April 7—John Bryant, professor of English, Hofstra University, “Big Data, Small Data: Melville and the Humanities as Fluid Texts”
- April 18—Barbara Savage, Geraldine Segal Professor of American Social Thought, Department of Africana Studies, University of Pennsylvania, “Merze Tate: Cosmopolitan Woman, Diplomatic Historian, World Traveler”
For more information, visit the Humanities Center website.
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C O N T A C T :
Joan Murray (865-974-4222, jmurra10@utk.edu)