Dr. Harold (Hal) D. Weaver is an Associate at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, and the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. Hal spent his earliest days on a small Black college campus in Savannah, GA, later moving to Pennsylvania and attending Westtown School and Haverford College. From his early experience in Communist Moscow as a member of an official USSR-USA young adult exchange group, Hal has been a lifelong cultural ambassador. He has traveled the world breaking down barriers and building bridges between cultures, often using film as the medium through The BlackFilm Project and the China-Africa-Russia Project. A pioneer in Africana studies, he founded and chaired the Africana Studies Department at Rutgers. Last fall, Hal continued his mission to correct Cold War historiography by delivering lectures in Moscow, the UK, and Istanbul, on Paul Robeson, African decolonization, African students in the USSR, and his own transnational experiences in cultural diplomacy.

He has procured the following honors throughout his academic career: Judith Weller Harvey Quaker Scholar, Guilford College, and Cadbury Scholar, Pendle Hill, 2019. Associate, Hutchins Center for African and African-American Research at Harvard University. Associate, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University.

Hal continues to break down barriers within the Religious Society of Friends, too, with his ministry, The BlackQuaker Project, one of the fruits of which was the publication of Black Fire: African-American Quakers on Spirituality and Human Rights (2011), which Hal edited with Paul Kriese and Stephen W. Angell. A member of Wellesley Friends Meeting, Hal is active locally, regionally, nationally, and internationally among Quakers. He has served in governance roles with the Quaker United Nations Office, the American Friends Service Committee, Pendle Hill, Cambridge Friends School, and the Friends World Committee for Consultation.