In Conversation with Professor Mia Bay & Dr. Meleisa Ono-George
Join us as we continue our discussion around the intellectual histories of Black women, with an ‘in conversation’ session with Professor Mia Bay and Dr. Meleisa Ono-George. Prof. Bay and Dr. Ono-George will lead with a conversation about their methodologies, praxis, and engagement with these histories, after which we will facilitate a Q&A session, where we welcome your questions, thoughts, and provocations.

Biography: Mia Bay is the newly appointed Paul A. Mellon Professor of American History in the University of Cambridge. Previously she taught at University of Pennsylvania, where she was Roy F. and Jeanette P. Nichols Professor of American History, and in the Department of History at Rutgers University, where she also led the Rutgers Center for Race and Ethnicity. She is a scholar of American and African American intellectual, cultural and social history whose interests include black women’s thought, African American approaches to citizenship, and the history of race and transportation.
Bay’s most recent book is the Bancroft prize-winning Traveling Black: A Story of Race and Resistance. Harvard University Press, 2021. Her previous books include To Tell the Truth Freely: the Life of Ida B. Wells. Hill & Wang, February 2009; The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas About White People 1830-1925, Oxford University Press, 2000, and the edited works Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015, which she co-edited with Martha Jones, Farah Griffin and Barbara Savage, and Race and Retail: Consumption Across the Color Line, Rutgers University Press, 2015, which she co-edited with Ann Fabian.
Bay’s current scholarly projects include a book on the history of African American ideas about Thomas Jefferson, and a study of streetcars and segregation in the nineteenth century United States.

Biography: Dr. Meleisa Ono-George is a social-cultural historian of race and gender, with a focus on Black women’s histories in Britain and the Anglo-Caribbean. She is interested in the everyday ways people oppressed within society negotiate and navigate structures of power and inequality, as well as the legacies and politics of writing such histories within contemporary society.
Dr Ono-George’s current research focuses on the life of an Afro-Jamaican woman in late eighteenth-century Jamaica and Britain and the archival remnants of her life. She is also currently developing a community-engaged project which looks at the history of Black mothering in Britain and the use of creative storytelling. Both projects draw upon her interest in community-engaged and Caribbean research methodologies.
Dr. Ono-George’s first book, My Name is Amelia Newsham: Science, Art and the Making of Race, is forthcoming from Viking Books.
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Date: 9 May 2025, 13:00
Venue: Radcliffe Humanities, Woodstock Road OX2 6GG
Venue Details: 2nd floor Lecture room
Speakers: Professor Mia Bay (University of Cambridge), Dr Meleisa Ono-George (The Queen's College)
Organising department: The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH)
Organiser: Holly Cooper (University of Oxford)
Organiser contact email address: raceandresistance@torch.ox.ac.uk
Part of: Race & Resistance
Booking required?: Not required
Audience: Members of the University only
Editor: Holly Cooper