As part of its year-long programming, the Center for Black Digital Research, joined by Penn State’s Africana Research Center, will convene an in-person symposium on the week of her two-hundredth birthday Friday, September 19–Sunday, September 21, 2025.

The symposium’s theme, “Frances E.W. Harper 200: Looking Back, Moving Forward,” evokes her kinetic activism and extraordinary creativity across decades, genres, and movements.  Frances Harper was the most prolific African American writer of the nineteenth century. She wrote and published collections of poetry, short stories, serialized fiction, essays, and now canonical novel, Iola Leroy. Her writing is infused by her commitment and advocacy for Black women: as a leading abolitionist orator, suffragist, and as an activist in political movements including Colored Conventions, women’s rights, and temperance.

Featured speakers at the symposium will address Harper’s diverse canon, Harper’s activism in Black feminist networks, how we must reconstruct Harper’s legacy, and offer new perspectives in Harper studies.