Positions: University Distinguished Professor; Associate Dean, The Graduate School
Fields: 20th Century African American History, Black Intellectual History, Black Studies
Regions: United States, African Diaspora
Office: 208C Old Horticulture
Email: dagbovie@msu.edu
Phone: (517) 884-4887
Pero Gaglo Dagbovie is University Distinguished Professor of History and Associate Dean in the Graduate School. His research and teaching interests comprise a range time periods, themes, and topical specialties, including black intellectual history, the history of the black historical enterprise, black women’s history, black life during “the nadir,” the civil rights-Black Power movement, African American Studies, hip hop culture, and contemporary black history.
His books include Black History: “Old School” Black Historians and the Hip Hop Generation (Bedford Publishers, Inc., 2006), The Early Black History Movement, Carter G. Woodson, and Lorenzo Johnston Greene (University of Illinois Press, 2007), African American History Reconsidered (University of Illinois Press, 2010), Carter G. Woodson in Washington, D.C.: The Father of Black History (The History Press, 2014), What is African American History? (Polity Press: Cambridge, UK, 2015), and Reclaiming the Black Past: The Use and Misuse of African American History in the Twenty-First Century (Verso Books, 2018). He is the next Editor of The Journal of African American History.
He has been involved in public history and African American history educational programs. He served as a scholar consultant for the permanent exhibit, “And Still We Rise: Our Journey through African American History and Culture,” at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit, Michigan. Under the auspices of the U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, National Capital Region, and the Organization of American Historians, from 2008 until 2010, he served as the principal investigator for the Carter G. Woodson Home, NHS and completed the historic resource study for the Woodson Home. He has participated in and lead workshops for secondary school teachers funded by the U.S. Department of Education and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Dr. Dagbovie has also lectured abroad and throughout the nation and he actively mentors graduate students in the Department of History and the African American and African Studies Ph.D. Program. He welcomes inquiries from students interested in specializing in African American history and Comparative Black History.
Selected Articles and Essays Published Since 2011:
“Booker T. Washington,” in Icons of Black America: Breaking Barriers and Crossing Boundaries. (Westport, CT: Greenwood: 2011), pp. 919-929.
“‘Most Honorable Mention . . . Belongs to Washington, DC’: The Carter G. Woodson Home and the Early Black History Movement in the Nation’s Capital.” The Journal of African American History (Summer 2011): 295-234.
“Reparations Demands for the New Millennium,” Journal of African American History (Special Issue: “African Americans and Movements for Reparations: Past, Present and Future”) Volume 97, Nos. 1-2 (Winter Spring 2012): 131-140.
“’GOD HAS SPARED ME TO TELL MY STORY’: Mabel Robinson Williams and the Civil Rights-Black Power Movement.” The Black Scholar Volume 43 Number ½ (Spring 2013): 69-88.
“A Glimpse of African American Life”: Sandra Seaton’s Rendering of the Civil Rights Movement in Music History.” Midwestern Miscellany XLI (Fall 2013): 53-64.
“Reflections on Conventional Portrayals of the African American Experience during the Progressive Era or ‘the Nadir.’” The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (a Cambridge University Press journal) Volume 13, Number 1 (January 2014): 4-27.
“Jim Crow Segregation Remembered,” The Public Historian: A Journal of Public History 36 (May 2014): 99-107.
“Obama, Hip Hop, and African American History and ‘Historical Revivalism.’” In The Hip Hop and Obama Reader, edited by Travis Lars Gosa and Erik Nielson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 109-132.
“(Re)introducing Foundational African American Historical Thought to a 21st-Century Readership,” The Journal of African American History102 (Spring 2017): 232-253.
“Some Challenges of Preserving and Exhibiting the African American Experience: Reflections on Working with the National Park Service,” The George Wright Forum: The GWS Journal of Parks, Protected Areas & Cultural Sites 34 (2017): 323-334.
Introduction for “Racial Politics and Struggles for Social Justice” in New Perspectives on the Black Intellectual Tradition, ed. Christopher Cameron, Ashley Farmer, and Keisha Blain (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2018): 133-137.