UMass History Department’s Distinguished Annual Lecture Presents Howard W. French: Africa’s Struggle for a Place in the World
Howard W. French
Source: UMass Department of History
Howard W. French, Visiting Writer in the UMass/Five College Graduate Program in History, will present this year’s Distinguished Annual Lecture, “Africa’s Struggle for a Place in the World”, on Tuesday, March 24, from 5:30-7:00 p.m. in the UMass Amherst Integrated Learning Center, 650 N. Pleasant Street, Room N151. The event is free and open to all.
Drawing on his acclaimed 2025 book, The Second Emancipation: Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide, Howard W. French will explore the deep history of Pan-Africanism, as well as Africa’s effaced centrality in 20th century history, from the world wars to the U.S. civil rights movement and the global education of Ghanaian politician Kwame Nkrumah.
A Q&A and book signing will follow the public lecture. Books will be available to purchase, courtesy of Amherst Books.
About The Visiting Writer
Howard W. French is a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He is also a former foreign correspondent and senior writer for the New York Times, having worked as a bureau chief in China, Japan, West and Central Africa and Central America and the Caribbean.
French has published five nonfiction books and one book of documentary photography, including: The Second Emancipation: Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide (2025); Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War (2021); Everything Under the Heavens: How the Past Helps Shape China’s Push for Global Power (2017); China’s Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa (2014); Disappearing Shanghai: Photographs and Poems of an Intimate Way of Life (2012) and A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa (2004).
He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a global affairs columnist at Foreign Policy, and a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books.
About the Distinguished Annual Lecture
The Department of History’s Distinguished Annual Lecture celebrates the 1996 establishment of the UMass/Five College Graduate Program in History. It is presented by the UMass/Five College Graduate Program in History with support from the UMass Amherst History Department and Five Colleges, Inc.