Katrina Honeyman Memorial Lecture

‘In Search of Race Women Internationalists: Activist-Intellectuals and Global Freedom Struggles’ A talk by Dr Imaobong Umoren, Assistant Professor at London School of Economics

This is a free event, however, booking is required. 

Outline

Race Women Internationalists explores how a group of Caribbean and African American women in the early and mid-twentieth century travelled 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 travelling; 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 internationalism to challenge various forms of inequality facing people of African descent across the diaspora and the continent.

Dr Imaobong Umoren

Currently Assistant Professor in the Department of International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science, Dr Umoren 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.

Katrina Honeyman 

This is a public talk in memory of Katrina Honeyman, who was Professor of Social and Economic History and an esteemed and beloved colleague in the School of History, University of Leeds for many years. Professor Honeyman was a distinguished historian of women, industrialisation and business history, as well as an active mentor to women, postgraduates and early career scholars within the School. In past years, the Katrina Honeyman Memorial Lecture has been given by Dr Katherine Angel (Birkbeck, University of London) and Professor Selina Todd (University of Oxford).