Barbara D. Savage

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Barbara D. Savage is the Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought and a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, where she has been a member of the faculty since 1995. Her research and teaching center on twentieth-century African American history, the historical relationship between media and politics, and African American religious history.

At Radcliffe, she hopes to complete a book on religion and African American political culture. This project charts the evolution of a wide variety of ideas about the relationship between African American religion and strategies for achieving racial equality in the fifty-year period stretching from the 1930s through the 1980s. These ideas reflect deeper political disagreements on the place of religious institutions, beliefs, and practices in the struggle for racial equality and, implicitly, on the questions of who ought to lead and control those institutions.

Savage received a PhD in history from Yale in 1995; she also holds a JD from Georgetown and a BA from the University of Virginia. Her publications include Broadcasting Freedom: Radio, War, and the Politics of Race, 1938–1948 (University of North Carolina Press, 1999), which won the Hoover Book Award for the best book in American history from 1916 to 1966. She has held fellowships at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library, at the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton, and at the Smithsonian Institution.