The First Black Dean in UK Academia
Join us for this History Work-In-Progress seminar with Professor Jeremy MacClancy.
This seminar will discuss Fernando Henriques, Jamaican anthropologist of mixed descent and the first Black Dean in British academia. A magisterial ethnographer of both colonialism in the Caribbean and coal mining in the UK, he was the most successful disseminator of anthropology in the postwar period, won fleeting notoriety as ‘Doctor Sex’ in the mid-1960s, and then became the first Black director of a Government-funded research centre, in multi-racial studies. Yet today mention of his name draws blank faces.
This seminar will be divided: a biographette, his work in Jamaica, then on industrial communities in Yorkshire, followed by his books on sex, and his final return to interethnic studies, concluding by considering the reasons he has been forgotten today.