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Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, (2016)
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Jarvis R. Givens is a professor of education and African and African American Studies at Harvard University, and he is also the co-founding faculty director of the Black Teacher Archive. As a historian who focuses on 19th and 20th-century African American history, Givens studies the educational and intellectual traditions of Black communities, documenting how these traditions developed within yet against the constraints of white supremacy. His research is especially interested in the interplay between race, power, and schooling in the United States, as well as the broader African Diaspora, and it exposes the role education and teachers played in Black freedom struggles of the past in order to provide resources for contemporary models of liberatory education.
Givens is the author of several acclaimed books, including Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching (Harvard University Press, 2021), which won five major awards, including the 2022 Outstanding Book Award from the American Educational Research Association, the Association for the Study of African American Life and History's 2022 ASALH Book Prize, and the History of Education Society's 2022 HES Book Award. His other works include School Clothes: A Collective Memoir of Black Student Witness (Beacon Press, 2023), American Grammar: Race, Education, and the Building of a Nation (Harper, 2025), and his latest work, I'll Make Me a World: The 100-Year Journey of Black History Month (Harper, 2026). He has also edited critical editions of classic works, including Booker T. Washington's Up from Slavery (Norton Library, 2023) and Carter G. Woodson's The Mis-Education of the Negro (Penguin Classics, 2023). Givens' scholarship has also been published in various outlets, including The Journal of African American History, American Educational Research Journal, LA Review of Books, The Atlantic, and more.
The Black Teacher Archive (BTA) is the largest digital collection of historical material related to African American teaching and education. Its primary holdings include over 1,800 journals and serial publications produced between 1907 and 1973 by Colored Teachers Associations (CTAs), which were professional groups formed by African American educators as early as 1861. The BTA functions as an experimental incubator for knowledge centralization, utilization, and distribution; and as a collection focused on materials and institutions central to African American history, this work has required a breaking of traditional archival form to account for the conditions of black life and preservation. This work is made possible through material contributions and labor distributed across dozens of institutions; and it has, therefore, necessitated the re-establishment of networks and thoughtful, collaborative curation. While Phase One of the BTA focused on the discovery and preservation of CTA journals most notably the construction of this developing digital portal (set to launch October 3, 2023), Phase Two will continue to expand this digital collection while also investing in intellectual communities around the study and practical uses of this rich archive and tradition. The next phase of the Black Teacher Archive will mobilize efforts in creating communities of connection, study, and application. Through a range of convenings we will improve familiarity with the content and educational strategies featured in the Black Teacher Archive. Conceptually, we will explore what we are calling a networked engagement model in promoting and encouraging researchers and educators to interact with the archive. The major activities of this grant are as proposed: ¿ Microgrants open to institutionally associated scholars, public historians, archivists, and librarians to support local efforts on Colored Teacher Associations ¿ Further portal infrastructure improvement through digital humanities explorations with geographical mapping and text analysis preparation. ¿ Digitize proceedings, programs, and minutes of Colored Teacher Associations ¿ Curriculum development for inclusion of the BTA in teacher training programs (pre-service) ¿ Professional development for current k-12 teachers (in-service) ¿ Curriculum development in Black studies courses encouraging collaboration between historians/digital humanists and archivist/librarians ¿ Summer research institutes for emerging history of Black education scholars ¿ Public Wikipedia edit-a-thons to update entries using the BTA ¿ Social media presence to share about the project and portal contents ¿ Black Education Studies and the Archive Convening in summer June 2026
Jarvis Givens’ latest book, "I’ll Make Me a World," looks back on a century of Black History Month celebrations
Professor Jarvis Givens uncovers how American schooling was shaped by race, land, and power and why that history still matters today
The groundbreaking new digital repository centralizes the experiences of Black educators during Jim Crow and creates new portals to understanding the history of African American education