Sojourner Truth Distinguished Lecture

This newly established annual lecture honors the legacy of Sojourner Truth and seeks to highlight voices whose scholarship and public engagement embody her spirit of resistance, truth-telling, and transformation.

Margaret Washington, PhD, Marie Underhill Noll Professor of American History, Emerita, Cornell University, will present the inaugural Sojourner Truth Distinguished Lecture, “Sojourner Truth, Central Park, and Legacies of Feminisms.”

Dr. Washington, who has deepened and reshaped the collective understanding of American history, race, and representation through her groundbreaking work on African American women’s history and profound scholarship on Sojourner Truth, will present Sojourner Truth’s significance to African American history and emphasize her feminism.

About the Speaker

Dr. Margaret Washington is the Marie Underhill Noll Professor of American History, Emerita at Cornell University. Her major publications include the award-winning “A Peculiar People: Slave Religion and Community Culture among the Gullahs”; editing and annotating the 1850 Narrative of Sojourner Truth; and a biography, entitled Sojourner Truth’s America.

Washington’s biography won the Association of Black Women Historians’ Letitia Woods Brown Award; the Organization of American Historians’ inaugural Darlene Clark Hine Award, and Choice Magazine placed Sojourner Truth’s America among the year’s ten most outstanding academic books.

As a public historian, Margaret Washington has advised and been historical consultant for numerous documentary films including, “Africans in America”; “Wade in the Water: the Musical Legacy of Gullah Culture”; “This Far by Faith”; “Abraham and Mary Lincoln: A House Divided”; CNN’s series, “Race for the White House”; and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s production, “Black Patriots: Heroes of the Revolution”.

Washington was among the founders of the international, interdisciplinary Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD). Margaret Washington is currently writing a book tentatively entitled, “’Thine for the Oppressed’: Race, Religion and Gender in the Antislavery Struggle”.

For any questions, please contact the Department of African, Black, and Caribbean Studies, dabcs@adelphi.edu.

This event is co-sponsored by the Department of African, Black, and Caribbean Studies and the Library Diversity Council.