Alain LeRoy Locke Lectures

The Alain LeRoy Locke Lectures are named after the godfather of the Harlem Renaissance, Alain LeRoy Locke (1885-1954). These lectures are intended to honor the memory and contributions of this noted Harvard scholar, who became the first and, until 1963, the only African American to win a Rhodes Scholarship to the University of Oxford. Co-sponsored by the Department of African and African American Studies, the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, and Basic/Civitas Books, a member of Perseus Books Group, this series was established to bring a distinguished person to deliver three lectures on a topic related to the field of African American culture and history.

Previous Alain LeRoy Locke Lectures include the following:

2011: Kimberly W. Benston, Black Hauntologies: Slavery, Modernity, Photography
2009: Kobena Mercer, Recrossings: Three Nineteenth-Century Black Atlantic Artists
2008: David Adjaye, Adjaye Associates Work
2008: Deborah Willis, Concepts of Beauty
2008: Anthony Davis, Deconstructing Opera, Creating Opera in a Post-Colonial World
2007: Paul Oliver, Proto-Blues: Secular Black Music Recorded in the Field
2006: Paule Marshall, People and Places in the Life of a Writer
2006: Walter Mosley, Street Philosophy by Socrates Fortlow
2005: Melvin Van Peebles, Connecting the Dots A La Barbershop
2004: Dwight Andrews, Giant Steps: Formations of a Black Music Aesthetic
2003: Gerald. L. Early, The Next Level of the Game: Cultural Observations on Three African American Athletes
2002: Elvis Mitchell, African Americans in Cinema: From Pride to Rage
2002: Manthia Diawara, Bamako
2001: Darryl Pinckney, Out There: Mavericks of Black Literature