Jarvis R. Givens is a professor of education and of African & African American studies at Harvard University, and he is currently the 2025 Leverhulme Visiting Professor at the University College London’s Institute of the Americas. As an interdisciplinary scholar, he specializes in 19th and 20th century African American history, history of education, and theories of race and power in education. Professor Givens’ work has been supported by fellowships and grants from the Ford Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, the William F. Milton Fund, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. From 2016 to 2018 he was a Dean’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Professor Givens’ first book, Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching, was published by Harvard University Press in 2021 and it received the following awards:
Winner, 2022 ASALH Book Prize, Association for the Study of African American Life and History
Winner, 2022 AERA Outstanding Book Award, American Educational Research Association
Winner, 2022 HES Book Award, History of Education Society
Winner, 2022 Lois P. Rudnick Book Prize, New England American Studies Association
Winner, 2022 Frederic W. Ness Book Award, American Association of Colleges & Universities
Finalist, 2022 MAAH Stone Book Award, Museum of African American History
Fugitive Pedagogy journeys through the history of African American education from slavery through the Jim Crow era, analyzing the political and intellectual work of black teachers as they worked to disrupt the structural and curricular manifestations of antiblackness in American schools. The famed educator and groundbreaking historian Carter G. Woodson is the central character in this story.
Professor Givens second book, School Clothes: A Collective Memoir of Black Student Witness, was published by Beacon Press in February 2023. This work traces the history of black students experiences in the United States while foregrounding the voices of black students themselves. To engage present-day students with this history, Professor Givens developed a School Clothes Teaching Guide to be used to adolescent learners. Teachers around the country have used this publicly available resource in African American studies, history, and English courses, as well as out-of-school learning spaces, such as the Long Beach Unified School District’s Black Literary Society in California.
Professor Givens’ third and most recent book, American Grammar: Race, Education, and the Building of a Nation (Harper, 2025), offers a new history of early US education by rigorously accounting for the native American and African American presence in the political-economic development of schooling through the 19th century. This work demonstrates how native land dispossession and enslaved labor contributed to the fiscal and physical development of American public schooling, and it also shows how racialized educational policies targeting black, native, and white Americans developed in relationship to one another, thus forming the national educational landscape we have inherited today.
In anticipation of the 100th anniversary since the first Negro History Week celebration in 1926, which has been celebrated as Black History Month since 1976, Professor Givens is completing a fourth book that reflects on this important milestone in the black intellectual tradition. This fourth book, entitled I’ll Make Me a World: The 100-Year Journey of Black History Month, traces the political origins of Black History Month, identifies enduring threats to black history, and it spells out practical things that can be done to preserve and expand the worthy tradition of “black memory work.” I’ll Make me a World will be published by Harper in February 2026.
Professor Givens edited and re-introduced two African American classics, both of which were released in 2023: Carter G. Woodson’s (1933) The Mis-Education of the Negro, published by Penguin Classics, and Booker T. Washington’s (1901) Up from Slavery, published by the Norton Library. He also co-edited We Dare Say Love: Supporting Achievement in the Educational Life of Black Boys, published by Columbia’s Teachers College Press in 2018. His articles appear in academic journals and various public outlets, such as The Atlantic, American Education Research Journal, The Journal of African American History, Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics Culture and Society, Harvard Educational Review, Black Perspectives, Anthropology & Education Quarterly, Education Weekly, and more.
The historical questions at the heart of Professor Givens’ research inform practical efforts. In 2020 he began building The Black Teacher Archive at Harvard in partnership with Professor Imani Perry of Harvard University and archivist Micha Broadnax. This digital humanities project has located and digitized a near complete collection of the serial journals and publications of Colored Teachers Associations between the 1920s and 1970. Professor Givens regularly engages educators, students, organizations, and communities around the importance of black educational history for our contemporary moment and the critical importance of African American teachers. He is also a life member and former executive council member of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History.
Professor Givens earned a BS in Business Administration then a MA and PhD in African American Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. He is originally from Compton, California and currently resides in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts.