Jarvis R. Givens

Jarvis R. Givens is a Professor of Education and African and African American Studies at Harvard University, and he is also the co-founding faculty director of the Black Teacher Archive. As a historian who focuses on 19th and 20th-century African American history, Givens studies the educational and intellectual traditions of Black communities, documenting how these traditions developed within yet against the constraints of white supremacy. His research is especially interested in the interplay between race, power, and schooling in the United States, as well as the broader African Diaspora, and it exposes the role education and teachers played in Black freedom struggles of the past in order to provide resources for contemporary models of liberatory education.

Givens is the author of several acclaimed books, including Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching (Harvard University Press, 2021), which won five major awards. His other works include School Clothes: A Collective Memoir of Black Student Witness (Beacon Press, 2023), American Grammar: Race, Education, and the Building of a Nation (Harper, 2025), and his latest work, I'll Make Me a World: The 100-Year Journey of Black History Month (Harper, 2026). He has also edited critical editions of classic works, including Booker T. Washington's Up from Slavery (Norton Library, 2023) and Carter G. Woodson's The Mis-Education of the Negro (Penguin Classics, 2023). Professor Givens' scholarship has also been published in various outlets, including The Journal of African American History, American Educational Research Journal, LA Review of Books, The Atlantic, and more.