Forum on Barbara D. Savage’s Merze Tate: The Global Odyssey of a Black Woman Scholar

Merze Tate (1905–1996) was a prolific academic who taught in the fields of diplomatic history and International Relations (IR) at Howard University in Washington D.C. After training as a teacher, Tate acquired graduate degrees from Oxford (1935) and Harvard (1941) and became one of the few African American female professors of her generation. She published widely, not only on disarmament, but also on IR as a field and discipline, and the history of imperialism in the Pacific region. Her ideas and interests were as wide-ranging as the influences that shaped her thought, including but not limited to the long tradition of Black political thought on race, war, and empire. In this forum, we discuss Barbara D. Savage’s recently published intellectual biography of Tate and what her thought, properly contextualized, has to offer to IR scholars invested in a “Howard School” of international thought, as well as to scholars of African American intellectual history.

Duke Scholars

Author Adriane D. Lentz-Smith History