The Center for Studies in the Wesleyan Tradition and the Methodist House of Studies are co-sponsoring a public lecture, Wesleyan Radicalism: The Insurgent Ethos of African Methodism, by Dr. Dennis C. Dickerson of Vanderbilt University. Please register in advance if you wish to partake in the provided lunch.

Dennis C. Dickerson is the Reverend James M. Lawson Chair in History and Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. He earned a B.A. from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, an M.A. and Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis, and an M.Div. from Vanderbilt University. He also studied at Hartford Seminary and Memphis Theological Seminary. At Vanderbilt University, he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in American and African-American history and special courses on the Civil Rights Movement, Religion and the Civil Rights Movement, and American and African-American Religious History. 

Dr. Dickerson has written Out of the Crucible: Black Steel Workers in Western Pennsylvania 1875-1980 (Albany, State University of New York Press, 1986) which chronicles the failed century-long struggle of Black steel laborers to attain occupational parity with their Caucasian counterparts. His book, Militant Mediator: Whitney M. Young, Jr. (Lexington, University Press of Kentucky, 1998), analyzes the leadership of a major leader in the U.S. Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s and was awarded the 1999 Distinguished Book from the National Conference of Black Political Scientists. His book, African American Preachers and Politics: The Careys of Chicago (Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 2010) examines the intersection between religion and politics in the careers of two clergy/politicians during most of the 20th century. His fourth book, The African Methodist Episcopal Church: A History (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2020), examines over two centuries of an African-American religious body and how its insurgent impulses reckoned with powerful national and international systems aimed at Black subjugation.