Open to all, the Katrina Honeyman Memorial Lecture on Monday 19 November remembers a distinguished historian of women, industrialisation and business history. Katrina was professor in the School of History at Leeds, and an active mentor to women, postgraduates and early career scholars there.
This year, the lecture will be delivered by Dr Imaobong Umoren (LSE), beginning at 5:15pm in Chemistry Lecture Theatre D and followed by a drinks reception in the Hamilton-Thompson foyer (Michael Sadler Building, Level 3). Reserve your free ticket in advance via Eventbrite, where you'll find full details. Capacity is limited and a full house expected.
‘In Search of Race Women Internationalists: Activist-Intellectuals and Global Freedom Struggles’
Talk by Dr Imaobong Umoren, author of Race Women Internationalists: Activist-Intellectuals and Global Freedom Struggles (2018)
Race Women Internationalists explores how a group of Caribbean and African American women in the early and mid-twentieth century traveled the world to fight colonialism, fascism, sexism, and racism. Based on newspaper articles, speeches, and creative fiction and adopting a comparative perspective, the book brings together the entangled lives of three notable but overlooked women: American Eslanda Robeson, Martinican Paulette Nardal, and Jamaican Una Marson. It explores how, between the 1920s and the 1960s, the trio participated in global freedom struggles by traveling; building networks in feminist, student, black-led, anticolonial, and antifascist organizations; and forging alliances with key leaders. This made them race women internationalists—figures who engaged with a variety of interconnected internationalisms to challenge various forms of inequality facing people of African descent across the diaspora and the continent.
Biography: Dr Imaobong Umoren is Assistant Professor in the Department of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She studied a BA in History and MA in World History and Cultures at King’s College London before moving to the University of Oxford where she gained her DPhil and spent a year serving as a Fulbright scholar at Harvard University. She subsequently took up a Career Development Fellowship jointly held with Pembroke College and the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities research programme Women in the Humanities. Dr Umoren's research interests include the intersecting history of race, gender, migration, and religion in the nineteenth and twentieth century Caribbean, US and global African diaspora. Her research has been supported by numerous bodies including the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Library of Congress, and the British Academy.