Case devoted to Sarah Orne Jewett and A Marsh Island at the Houghton Library, Harvard University
Houghton Library exhibit case: Sarah Orne Jewett’s A Marsh Island (1885)
(Summer-Fall 2022)
In 2021, the Houghton Library awarded me a fellowship through the New England Regional Fellowship Consortium to conduct research on Sarah Orne Jewett’s manuscript for her 1885 novel A Marsh Island. In 2022, coinciding with the opening of their renovated reading room, the Houghton invited me to write the label for a case devoted to Jewett in their welcoming rotunda.
2016-7 Brown Bag Schedule at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies
Brown Bag Workshop Series, McNeil Center for Early American Studies
(Sept 2016–Apr 2017)
Coordinator; Host
This annual series at the McNeil Center showcases strong scholarship from PhD Candidates completing dissertations in Early American literature, history, and art criticism. The 2016-17 series will feature papers on erotic revivalist accounts from the Great Awakening, theological perspectives on body-snatching and dissection in the early republic, representations of African American motherhood in the antebellum North, and inter-imperial disputes between French and English settlers over Newfoundland cod fisheries in the 1760s, among others.
1855 first edition folio of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass
That's So Gay: Outing Early America
(Feb 14–Oct 17, 2014)
Collaborator for exhibit at the Library Company of Philadelphia; Editor of and contributor to exhibit materials and literature
How can we tell what it was like to be gay in earlier periods? Ultimately, we cannot know whether a person who lived in the past would have identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender today. Nevertheless, scholars have developed a number of strategies for getting at related questions. Individuals took part in same-sex relationships, wrote poems and novels celebrating such relationships, deviated from gender norms, and suffered for transgressive behavior in ways that are well-documented in the historical record. Beneath the covers of our books there are many stories. To paraphrase the late gay activist Harry Hay (1912-2002), history knows more about gay people than it knows it knows.
Reviews
"Outing Early America," New York Times, Feb. 7, 2014