These lectures are sponsored by the Herbert P. Lefler fund.
Fall 2026 Lefler Lecture
Tuesday, October 13, 5:15 pm
Dr. Rashauna Johnson, Associate Professor of US History and the College, University of Chicago
Title: TBD
Rashauna Johnson is a historian of the 19th-century African diaspora, with an emphasis on slavery and emancipation in the US South and Atlantic World. She is especially interested in the limits and possibilities of archival histories of enslaved and freed people and the worlds in which they labored and lived. Johnson teaches courses on race, slavery, and nation; methodologies of slavery studies; and the 19th-century US.
Winter 2027 Lefler Lecture
Date: TBD
Speaker: TBD
Title: TBD
Questions? Contact Prof. Andrew Fisher, History Department Chair
“History, as nearly no one seems to know, is not merely something to be read. And it does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do.”
— James Baldwin, “The White Man’s Guilt,” Ebony Magazine, August 1965