This seminar is held at Antiquarian Hall, 185 Salisbury Street, Worcester, Massachusetts
American Antiquarian Society
185 Salisbury Street
Worcester, MA 01609
United States
Who in the twenty-first-century reads newspapers and journals for poetic inspiration? Yet in the nineteenth-century, newspapers and magazines featured poems covering a wide variety of topics: labor, fashion, abolition, temperance, war, women’s rights, death, love, nature, religion, and more. In this year's American Studies Seminar, students will examine poetry in nineteenth-century periodicals and other forms of mass printing (broadsides, chapbooks, compilations). They will explore what these poems tell us about popular print media over time; how editors positioned poetry in their publications; how poetry was used to influence readers; which authors appeared most prominently and to what effect. In a workshop setting, students have an opportunity to interact with numerous archival materials, produce significant research projects, and experiment with poems of their own. There are no prerequisites.
The seminar will meet during the Fall 2025 semester on Thursday afternoons, from 2-4 p.m., at the American Antiquarian Society, 185 Salisbury Street, Worcester, Massachusetts. The first class will be held on Thursday, September 4, 2025.
About the Seminar Leader
Wyn Kelley, senior lecturer in the literature faculty at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology, has published academic research on nineteenth-century authors, and also has considerable experience in print and digital editing. As a recent National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow (2023-24) at AAS, she commenced new work on Frances E. W. Harper and her writing in The Anglo-African Magazine. In that project and other recent scholarship, she has been particularly interested in the presence of Brazilian stories of enslavement and freedom in United States print culture.