Join us virtually to hear Eric Gardner discuss his most recent book, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's Civil War and Reconstruction (September 2025), which offers a powerful reexamination of one of the most important yet understudied Black women of the nineteenth-century. A writer, activist, and lecturer, Harper fought tirelessly for abolition, civil rights, women’s suffrage, and temperance. While her name was widely recognized during her lifetime, her contributions—particularly during the Civil War and Reconstruction—have been overlooked or minimized by later critics.
Gardner’s book restores Harper to the central role she played in shaping American political and literary life. Through extensive archival research, he explores her work across genres—poetry, essays, fiction, and speeches—and traces her remarkable speaking career, which took her to communities across the country. Framing Harper as not just a writer or reformer but also a visionary thinker and public intellectual, Gardner shows how she articulated a bold vision for Reconstruction—not simply as a period of rebuilding, but as a time to erase injustice and build a new, equitable nation. Harper’s work, he argues, modeled a kind of citizenship grounded in justice, memory, and community, making her a vital figure for understanding both her own era and the long fight for equality in America.
This book talk will feature the author in conversation with AAS members Sherita L. Johnson and Derrick R. Spires.
Eric Gardner is chair of the English Department at Saginaw Valley State University. He is the author of two prize-winning monographs:Unexpected Places: Relocating Nineteenth-Century African American Literature (2009) and Black Print Unbound: The Christian Recorder, African American Literature, and Periodical Culture (2015). He has also edited five books and published a wide range of shorter work on nineteenth-century African American literature and culture. A founding convenor of Just Teach One: Early African American Print, Gardner has won recognition from organizations ranging from the Saginaw County NAACP to the National Endowment for the Humanities. He was elected to AAS membership in October 2024.
Sherita L. Johnson is the director of the College of the Liberal Arts’ Africana Research Center (ARC) and an associate professor of English. She is the author of Black Women in New South Literature and Culture (2009), and has contributed to African American Literature in Transition, 1865-1880 (2021) and Remediating Region: New Media and the U.S. South (2021). Her current projects include examining the life and writings of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, tracking Frederick Douglass in the colored conventions movement, and investigating African American experiences during Reconstruction. She was a Diana Korzenik Virtual Research Fellow in 2022-23 and was elected to AAS Membership in April 2024.
Derrick R. Spires is the John and Patricia Cochran Scholar of Inclusive Excellence and Associate Professor of English at the University of Delaware. He specializes in early African American and American print culture, citizenship studies, and African American intellectual history. His first book, The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States (2019), won the Modern Language Association Prize for First Book and the St. Louis Mercantile Library Prize. Spires is part of the editorial team for the Broadview Anthology of American Literature, and he edits the book series, “Black Print and Organizing in the Long Nineteenth Century,” with P. Gabrielle Foreman and Shirley Moody-Turner at the University of Pennsylvania Press. Spires was a Kate B. and Hall J. Peterson Fellow at AAS in 2008-09 and was elected to membership in the Society in November 2020.