American Literature
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War Power: Literature and the State in the Civil War North | Join us virtually on Zoom to hear Philip Gould discuss his newest book War Power: Literature and the State in the Civil War North, (2024). Gould will speak generally about the work and also give an overview of its readings, from authors such as Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Louisa May Alcott. By the end of the program the audience will see the parallels between the wartime state in the 1860s, with its expansion of federal and executive authority, to political questions we face today. |
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Phobia and American Literature, 1705-1937: A Therapeutic History | This virtual talk by Don James McLaughlin offers a new history of phobia’s rise as a framework for understanding the human mind and political life from the colonial era through the nineteenth century. He shows how phobia first acquired familiarity through “hydrophobia,” the historic name for rabies. Transliterated from the Greek, hydrophobia referenced a fear of water understood to be the disease’s telltale symptom, emanating from painful throat convulsions induced when trying to drink. |
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Edgar Allan Poe: A Life | Join us in person or virtually to hear biographer Richard Kopley discuss on his new book Edgar Allan Poe: A Life (2025), followed by a conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Megan Marshall. |
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Textual Editing and the Future of Scholarly Editions (Panel 4) | Panel 4 - "Textual Editing and the Future of Digital Editions"
Chair and Keynote: |
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Recovering the Lost Years of John Peters and Phillis Wheatley Peters | Though the early years of Phillis Wheatley’s life are well-established, the details of her life after she became Phillis Peters upon her marriage to John Peters, a free Black shopkeeper in Boston, have been more difficult to discern. In this conversation, Henry Louis Gates Jr. will discuss with Cornelia Dayton her groundbreaking article, recently published in the New England Quarterly, which uses a cache of Essex County legal papers to shed light on this period of Wheatley Peters’s life. |
Dickinson Unbound: Paper, Process, Poetics | ||
Oracles of Empire: Poetry, Politics, and Commerce in British America, 1690-1750 | ||
Money, Language, and Thought: Literary and Philosophic Economies from the Medieval to the Modern Era | ||
Moral Enterprise: Literature and Education in Antebellum America | ||
Writing the Seaman's Tale in Law and Literature: Dana, Melville, and Justice Story |