Jarvis Givens

Associate Professor, Harvard University

Jarvis R. Givens is an Associate Professor of Education and African & African American Studies at Harvard University. He is the author of two books: School Clothes: A Collective Memoir of Black Student Witness (Beacon Press, February 2023) and Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching (Harvard University Press, 2021), which won several book awards, including the History of Education Society’s 2022 Outstanding Book Award, the American Educational Research Association’s 2022 Outstanding Book Award, and the 2022 Book Award from the Association for the Study of African American Life and History. Professor Givens recently prepared new editions of two African American classics: Carter G. Woodson’s The Mis-education of the Negro, published by Penguin Classics, and Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery, to be published by the Norton Library. In partnership with Imani Perry of Princeton University, he is also the principal investigator of The Black Teacher Archive, a digital humanities project sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and focused on preserving the political and intellectual legacy of black schoolteachers before 1970. His research has been published in journals and magazines including: The Atlantic, The Boston Globe, American Educational Research Journal, Souls, and Harvard Educational Review. Professor Givens earned his PhD in African American Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. He is a native of Compton, California, and currently resides in Roxbury, Massachusetts.