Dr. Roberts will explore the life and work of Dr. Woodson, considered the Father of African American History. In February of 1926, Dr. Woodson launched the first national program dedicated to the study of African American History, which is widely viewed as the forerunner of Black History Month.
Christopher Roberts earned a PhD in Africology and African American Studies from Temple University and an MA in Ethnic Studies from San Francisco State University. He examines Black geographies of memory and forgetting, with an emphasis on port cities in the US that anchored the transatlantic and domestic slave trades. His current manuscript project proposes an alternative episteme through which we can unsettle the antiblackness and geographic imperialism inherent in the monumental landscape of the US via robust archival, field and digital humanities research that analyzes Confederate monuments and African burial grounds in the US American South. Prior to teaching at RISD, he taught at Brown University, where he was the Artemis AW and Martha Joukowsky Postdoctoral Fellow at The Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women.
