Givens Named Associate Professor

Harvard Graduate School of Education Dean Bridget Long has announced that Jarvis Givens has been promoted to associate professor. Givens' work focuses on 19th- and 20th-century African American history, history of education, and theories of race and power in education. He joined the HGSE faculty in 2018. 

“I am thrilled to recognize the incredible scholarship and achievements of Jarvis Givens with this well-deserved promotion," Long said. "He has quickly become a leader in the field, and the numerous awards for his 2021 book illustrate the critical importance of his work. Jarvis has also created The Black Teacher Archive, a public humanities project that will create the largest digital repository of material on African American education and teachers, further demonstrating his many contributions to the field. At HGSE, Jarvis has provided valuable leadership for the CIS doctoral concentration and the Equity and Opportunity Foundations course. I look forward to continuing our work together in the years to come.”

Givens created the concept of “fugitive pedagogy” to illuminate the ways that Black educators seek to undermine anti-Black ideology at the core of American schooling and society. His 2021 Harvard University Press title, Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching, which traces the history and unique challenges and conditions of Black teaching and learning in America, received the 2022 Outstanding Book Award from the American Educational Research Association. The work was also honored with the 2022 ASALH Book Prize for the best new book in African American history and culture.

In 2020, Givens partnered with Princeton's Imani Perry to launch the Black Teacher Archive at Harvard University, a project that digitizes and archives the records of national and state “Colored Teachers Associations” organized by Black educators from the antebellum era through Jim Crow. Access to these materials, largely the products of teachers in segregated Southern schools, is key to advancing research on the history of education, African American studies, and critical pedagogy. 

At HGSE, Givens teaches the History of African American Education, as well as Race and Ethnicity in Context within the Equity and Opportunity Foundation. Prior to joining the faculty, he was a Dean’s Postdoctoral Fellow at HGSE, and from 2020–21, he was the Suzanne Young Murray Assistant Professor at Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies.