Video: Kate Dossett @ Gresham College - Women of the Harlem Renaissance
Former ISRF Mid-Career Fellow Professor Kate Dossett introduces the cultural movement known as the Harlem Renaissance, as part of the Gresham College public lecture series.
In the early twentieth century Black creatives were America’s artistic vanguard.
In the cultural movement known as the Harlem Renaissance, African Americans created new platforms to promote their work and learned to navigate white gatekeepers who controlled America’s publishing and cultural industries.
At the forefront of this movement, women were among its most radical thinkers: as playwrights, poets, novelists and artists such as Gwendolyn Bennett and Nella Larsen, they explored new ways of thinking about motherhood, sexuality, bodily autonomy and racial violence.
Gresham College has been providing free, public lectures since 1597 when Sir Thomas Gresham founded the college to bring the ‘new learning’ to Londoners.
Kate Dossett is Professor of American History at the University of Leeds. She is a historian of the twentieth century United States with broad interests in cultural and political history and specializations in African American History, Gender histories and histories of the African Diaspora. She has published widely on Black cultural history including theatre, the Harlem Renaissance, Black Feminism and the histories of the archive. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Women’s History, African American Review, the Journal of American Studies and the Journal of American Drama and Theatre. She is the author of the award-winning book, Bridging Race Divides: Feminism, Nationalism and Integration, 1896-1935.
Her latest book, Radical Black Theatre in the New Deal, examines Black theatre making and performance in the 1930s and was published in the John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture by the University of North Carolina Press in Spring 2020.
