The University of Lynchburg’s Ida Wise East Memorial Lecture series will present Dr. Jennifer Hart, chair of the history department at Virginia Tech, at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, April 8.

Hart’s lecture, “Historical Assumptions, Conceptual Illusions, and Other Lessons Learned by Thinking from the Margins,” will be held in Hall Campus Center’s Memorial Ballroom. Admission is free and the public is invited.

“I chose Jennifer Hart as this year’s Ida Wise East Memorial Lecture speaker because she is a great advocate for the humanities at a time when they are under attack inside and outside of academia,” Dr. Brian Crim, history department chair at Lynchburg, said.

“As chair of a large and influential history department at Virginia Tech, Dr. Hart is in a position to influence the next generation of teachers and scholars. She also holds a number of leadership positions focused on history education.

“I’m excited about her talk because she will incorporate her research into modern African history, which is widely respected. History is inclusive. I think her talk will demonstrate that.”

As described by Hart, the talk “explores the sorts of assumptions that are implicit in our historical narratives and analytical concepts and thinks about how we might reframe our assumptions if we think from the margins.

“Grounded in the lessons from the history of Africa, this talk asks us to reflect on what we think we know, where that knowledge comes from, what else is possible when we challenge the story we tell ourselves and others about the past, and why inclusive and challenging history education matters.”

Hart is the author of “Ghana on the Go: African Mobility in the Age of Motor Transportation” and “Making an African City: Technopolitics and the Infrastructure of Everyday Life in Colonial Accra.”

Her writing has appeared in The Washington Post, Africa is a Country, Inside Higher Ed, History@Work, The Metropole, Clio and the Contemporary, Nursing Clio, The Conversation, TAP Narratives, The Detroit News, andnumerous edited collections and journals. 

She also blogs at ghanaonthego.com. 

Hart received the Boahen-Wilks Prize from the Ghana Studies Association and was a 2016 finalist for the Herskovits Prize from the African Studies Association. She is the director of Accra Wala, described as “a spatially-embedded, community- generated archive of urban life in Accra, Ghana,” and a collaborator on @thistrotrolife on Instagram.

She is a senior scholar in the Office of Curricular and Pedagogical Innovation at the American Association of Colleges and Universities and North American president of the International Society for the Scholarship on Teaching and Learning in History.

Hart also serves on the executive council of the African Studies Association and the Africa Initiative Steering Committee for the Society for the History of Technology. 

 For more information about the lecture, contact Crim at [email protected].

The Ida Wise East Memorial Lecture is sponsored by the John Franklin East Distinguished Chair in the Humanities.