“Mapping Era Bell Thompson: Ebony and the Popularization of a Pan-African Consciousness”, 2025 BMRC Fellows Fall Presentation by Martha Patterson – Nov 6, 2025

The Black Metropolis Research Consortium (BMRC) invites you to join us on Thursday, November 6, 2025, from 11.30 AM to 12.30 PM CST for a virtual presentation in the 2025 Fellows Fall Speaker Series. Martha Patterson will share the results of his research on "Mapping Era Bell Thompson: Ebony and the Popularization of a Pan-African Consciousness."

Dr. Martha H. Patterson is co-editor with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., of The New Negro: A History in Documents, 1887-1937 (Princeton University Press, 2025) and author of The Harlem Renaissance Weekly: Reading the New Negro Movement in 1920s Black Newspapers (Cambridge University Press, 2025). She is also editing the Cambridge Companion to Fiction of the Harlem Renaissance (Cambridge University Press, 2026).

Discussant: Dr. E. James West, Lecturer in Interdisciplinary Societies and Cultures (Arts and Sciences), University College London. Dr. West's research focuses primarily on the Black Press and African American urban history. More broadly, he is interested in race, rights, and media across the Black diaspora. He welcomes enquiries from graduate students interested in working on these and similar topics. He is the author of four books, including the award-winning A House for the Struggle (2022). Other works include Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr. (2020), Our Kind of Historian (2022), and Media Building (2025, with Will Mari and Carole O'Reilly). His commentary appears in major outlets such as the New York Times, BBC, TIME, Slate, NPR, and the Washington Post.

Join us online via Zoom: https://bit.ly/47aB0xO.