The African Presence In Renaissance Europe Conference

Name: The African Presence In Renaissance Europe Conference
Start: 2026-02-20T18:15:00-06:00
End: 2026-02-22T18:00:00-06:00
Location: 217 Home Ave, Oak Park, IL 60302-3101, United States

Schedule

Fri, 20 Feb, 2026 at 06:15 pm to Sun, 22 Feb, 2026 at 06:00 pm

UTC-06:00

Location

217 Home Ave, Oak Park, IL 60302-3101, United States | Oak Park, IL

This is a multi-day event dedicated to highlighting the African presence across the European continent during the 14th-17th centuries.
The setting is the picturesque Pleasant Home Museum in Oak Park IL.
There will be guest speakers, classes, a pan-historical era dance party, and a limited-availability workshop with The Tudor Tailor.
Keynote speaker: Dr Onyeka Nubia - "Dr Onyeka Nubia is a pioneering and internationally recognised historian, writer and presenter who is reinventing our perceptions of the Renaissance, British history, Black Studies and intersectionalism. Onyeka is the leading historian on the status and origins of Africans in pre-colonial England from antiquity to 1603."
Keynote speaker: Mr Michael Ohajuru - "Michael Ohajuru is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a Senior Research Fellow of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies. He blogs, writes, and speaks regularly on identifying, understanding, and interpreting the Black African presence in Renaissance art... Ohajuru is the project director of the John Blanke Project, a contemporary art and archive project celebrating John Blanke, the Black trumpeter to the Tudor courts of Henry VII and Henry VIII. He is also a founding member of the Black Presence in British Portraiture network, managing their podcast The BP2 Podcast."
Featured Presenters - The Tudor Tailor, Jane Malcolm-Davies & Ninya Mikhaila.
"Jane Malcolm-Davies is associate professor at The Globe Institute, University of Copenhagen, where she works with collaborator in Beasts2Craft, an EU-funded research project investigating parchment as evidence for historical sheep husbandry."
"Ninya Mikhaila established her business making reconstructions of historic costumes for museums and heritage sites in 1994 after gaining a Higher National Diploma in Costume Interpretation at the London College of Fashion. Her clients include Historic Royal Palaces, The Royal Armouries, The National Trust, English Heritage, The National Archives and The Royal Collection."
Details will be published as they become available.