Events
Concentrating on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Erica Armstrong Dunbar became a historian of the African American experience by committing herself to telling the stories of Black women who lived, loved, struggled, worked, prayed, and fought to survive in a nation that still recognized many of them as property. In her scholarship and public-facing work, she focuses on the uncomfortable concepts of slavery, racial injustice, and gender inequality.
Since 2004, the Africana Research Center has sponsored the Barbara Jordan Lecture Series to recognize and introduce the Penn State community to the scholarship of an African American civil rights activist, scholar, and/or public intellectual. The ARC named the lecture after Congresswoman Barbara Jordan because she was a modern day “giant” in activism, scholarship, and action before her untimely death in 1996.
Fall 2025
As part of its year-long programming, the Center for Black Digital Research, joined by Penn State’s Africana Research Center, will convene an in-person symposium on the week of her two-hundredth birthday, Friday, September 19–Sunday, September 21, 2025.
The symposium’s theme, “Frances E.W. Harper 200: Looking Back, Moving Forward,” evokes her kinetic activism and extraordinary creativity across decades, genres, and movements. Frances Harper was the most prolific African American writer of the nineteenth century. She wrote and published collections of poetry, short stories, serialized fiction, essays, and now canonical novel, Iola Leroy. Her writing is infused by her commitment and advocacy for Black women: as a leading abolitionist orator, suffragist, and as an activist in political movements including Colored Conventions, women’s rights, and temperance.
Featured speakers at the symposium will address Harper’s diverse canon, Harper’s activism in Black feminist networks, how we must reconstruct Harper’s legacy, and offer new perspectives in Harper studies.
As part of its year-long programming, the Center for Black Digital Research, joined by Penn State’s Africana Research Center, will convene an in-person symposium on the week of her two-hundredth birthday, Friday, September 19–Sunday, September 21, 2025.
The symposium’s theme, “Frances E.W. Harper 200: Looking Back, Moving Forward,” evokes her kinetic activism and extraordinary creativity across decades, genres, and movements. Frances Harper was the most prolific African American writer of the nineteenth century. She wrote and published collections of poetry, short stories, serialized fiction, essays, and now canonical novel, Iola Leroy. Her writing is infused by her commitment and advocacy for Black women: as a leading abolitionist orator, suffragist, and as an activist in political movements including Colored Conventions, women’s rights, and temperance.
Featured speakers at the symposium will address Harper’s diverse canon, Harper’s activism in Black feminist networks, how we must reconstruct Harper’s legacy, and offer new perspectives in Harper studies.
As part of its year-long programming, the Center for Black Digital Research, joined by Penn State’s Africana Research Center, will convene an in-person symposium on the week of her two-hundredth birthday Friday, September 19–Sunday, September 21, 2025.
The symposium’s theme, “Frances E.W. Harper 200: Looking Back, Moving Forward,” evokes her kinetic activism and extraordinary creativity across decades, genres, and movements. Frances Harper was the most prolific African American writer of the nineteenth century. She wrote and published collections of poetry, short stories, serialized fiction, essays, and now canonical novel, Iola Leroy. Her writing is infused by her commitment and advocacy for Black women: as a leading abolitionist orator, suffragist, and as an activist in political movements including Colored Conventions, women’s rights, and temperance.
Featured speakers at the symposium will address Harper’s diverse canon, Harper’s activism in Black feminist networks, how we must reconstruct Harper’s legacy, and offer new perspectives in Harper studies.