Please join us for this Inaugural Professorial Lecture by Professor Toby Green, with responses from Ana Lúcia Araujo (Howard University) and José Lingna Nafafé (University of Bristol)

In this lecture Green asks how different the Western academic model would be if it were to address African lives on their own terms. How different does the academic landscape look if African modes of discussion and analysis are fully included – and why is it so urgent that this take place?

Green is a historian of West Africa and of global inequality. He has worked principally on precolonial Western Africa and economic inequality (16th-19th centuries), and on the response to the Covid-19 pandemic and its relationship to global inequality. Green's 2019 book A Fistful of Shells was awarded the British Academy Book Prize and the American Historical Association's Jerry Bentley Prize in World History.

Green has organised events in collaboration with institutions in Angola, Brazil, Ghana, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, and The Gambia, and is a member of the Pan-African Epidemic and Pandemic Working Group. He has worked widely on curriculum reform in the teaching of African history in the UK and West Africa. He is a member of the UK government's Model History Curriculum Advisory Committee, and in July 2024 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy.

Toby Green is Professor of Precolonial and Lusophone African History and Culture at the Faculty of Arts & Humanities, King's College London.