Barbara D. Savage

Barbara D. Savage is an historian and the Geraldine R. Segal Professor Emerita of American Social Thought and Africana Studies. She is a Distinguished Fellow at the Rothermere American Institute at Oxford where a thesis prize in Black History is named in her honor

Savage has written three books and co-edited two others. Merze Tate: The Global Odyssey of a Black Woman Scholar is an intellectual biography of an African American woman who taught in the fields of diplomatic history and international relations at Howard University from 1942 to 1977. With graduate degrees from from Oxford (1935) and Harvard (1941), Tate was one of the few black women academics of her generation and a prolific scholar with a wide-range of interests. Savage’s introductory essay on Tate was included in Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women, a collaborative collection she co-edited with Mia Bay, Farah J. Griffin, and Martha S. Jones. Her books include Your Spirits Walk Beside Us: The Politics of Black Religion and Broadcasting Freedom: Radio, War, and the Politics of Race, 1938-1948. In addition, she is co-editor of Women and Religion in the African Diaspora, a collaborative project led by R. Marie Griffith.