Mandela & MK: Situating South African History within the Black Radical Tradition.

The CHR welcomes Robert Trent Vinson who will be giving a public lecture as part of the CHR’s Winter School programme on Tuesday 23 July and the launch of the CHR’s Humanities hub on 30 July.

Date: Tuesday 23 July.

Time: 4:00pm

Venue: The CHR’s Iyatsiba Lab, 66 Greatmore Street, Woodstock, (Entrance on Regent Road).

Chair: Fernanda Pinto de Almeida (CHR)

Convened in collaboration with the SARChI Chair in Social Change, University of Fort Hare (UFH), the Interdisciplinary Centre for the Study of Global Change (ICGC), University of Minnesota (UM), and the and the Institute of the Humanities and Global Cultures (University of Virginia), this year’s theme coalesces around the question of Partition / non-Partition, and will include three public lectures by Robert Trent Vinson, Rita Duffy and Mongane Serote.

Robert Trent Vinson

Robert Trent Vinson is the Commonwealth Professor of African American & African Studies at the University of Virginia, where he serves as Chair of the Department of African American & African Studies and the Director of the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American & African Studies. He is also a Research Associate at Stellenbosch University in South Africa.  He is a scholar and teacher of 19^th and 20^th century African & African Diaspora history, specializing in the transnational connections between southern Africa, the Americas and the Caribbean.

Vinson’s publications include two books, The Americans Are Coming! Dreams of ’American Negro Liberation’ in Segregationist South Africa (2012) and Albert Luthuli: Mandela before Mandela (2018). A third book, Religion & Democracy in Africa, is scheduled for publication in 2025.  He has also published many articles, including in the Journal of African History, the African Studies Review, and the Journal of Southern African Studies. Vinson is also currently completing two co-authored book projects, Zulu Diasporas: Africa and Africans in Black Nationalist Histories & American Popular Culture (with Benedict Carton) and Crossing the Water: African Americans and South Africa, 1890-1965: A Documentary History (with Bob Edgar & David Anthony).

Vinson is the immediate past President of the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD), the world’s premier professional organization of African and African Diaspora scholars. He also serves on the Board of Directors of the African Studies Association and on the editorial board of Michigan State University Press and of Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies.

Vinson earned his Ph.D. in African History from Howard University. Prior to his appointment at UVA, Vinson taught at Washington University in St. Louis and more recently, William & Mary, where he was Frances L. and Edwin L. Cummings Professor of History & Africana Studies.  At William & Mary, Vinson was also the first Chair of the Lemon Project, which documents, preserves and disseminates scholarship that uncovered the College’s long histories of slavery and Jim Crow segregation.