What do the lives of individuals reveal about power and privilege and the forces that oppose it? Answers can be found in the lives of a refugee from Nazi-occupied Warsaw who became an advocate for people fleeing violence in Central America and Haiti; of a former Black Power-era activist turned US congressman who spearheaded solidarity with African liberation; of an elite Indian diplomat who used her privilege as an ambassador and President of the UN General Assembly to promote peace; and of a young revolutionary leader of 1980s Burkina Faso who fought for social justice before he was assassinated.

 

Graduate Center Professor Emeritus David Nasaw is a founding member of Radical History Review. His most recent book is The Last Million:  Europe’s Displaced Persons from World War to Cold War (2020). In addition, he is the author of prize-winning biographies that have been short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize, including The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst; Andrew Carnegie; and The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy. 

 

Teresa Meade is Florence B. Sherwood Professor of History and Culture, Emerita at Union College, Schenectady, NY.  She is the author and editor of several books, including Modern Latin American History from Independence to the Present (3 editions), A Brief History of Brazil (3 editions), “Civilizing Rio”: Reform and Resistance in a Brazilian City, 1889-1930, The Companion to Global Gender History (with Merry Wiesner-Hanks), and many scholarly articles on Latin America and gender studies. Her most recent book is a biography  “We Don’t Become Refugees by Choice”: Mia Truskier, Survival, and Activism, from Occupied Poland to California, 1920-2014.

Manu Bhagavan is Professor of History, Human Rights, and Public Policy at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, and Senior Fellow at the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies. He is the author of The Peacemakers (2012, 2013) and Sovereign Spheres (2003), and the (co-) editor of 4 other books.  His latest work, India and the Cold War (ed.), released in Fall 2019 from UNC Press and Penguin India. He is currently writing a biography of Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, one of the most celebrated women of the 20th century and a pioneer in international diplomacy. His  Quartz essay on global authoritarianism went viral internationally and was translated into German as the cover article of the May 2016 Berliner Republik magazine. 

 

Benjamin Talton is Professor of History at Temple University and an affiliate of the Global Studies Program. He earned his doctorate at the University of Chicago and BA at Howard University. His research, writing, and teaching focus on politics and culture in modern Africa and the African Diaspora. He is the author of In This Land of Plenty: Mickey Leland and Africa in American Politics (Penn Press, 2019), which won the 2020 Wesley-Logan Prize and was a Finalist for the 2020 Pauli Murray Prize, and of The Politics of Social Change in Ghana: The Konkomba Struggle for Political Equality (Palgrave, 2010) and Black Subjects in Africa and its Diasporas: Race and Gender in Research and Writing (Palgrave, 2011), with Dr. Quincy Mills University of Maryland, College Park.

 

Brian Peterson is a historian of Africa at Union College in Schenectady, New York. His most recent book is Thomas Sankara: A Revolutionary in Cold War Africa. He is the author of Islamization from Below:  The Making of Muslim Communities in Rural French Sudan,1880-1960 (Yale University Press, 2011).

 

Radical Biography: Confrontations of Race, Gender, Power and Privilege

David Nasaw, Teresa Meade, Manu Bhagavan & Benjamin Talton

Tuesday, March 22, 6 pm 

Register here: https://gc-cuny-edu.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0qdOqoqTMtHdHoXaA8wyLEAU_bHyrOqLGE

 

Sponsored by the Leon Levy Center for Biography