As one of the codirectors of a year-long initiative honoring the life and work of Phillis Wheatley Peters, I'm pausing this week to reflect on our collaborative project's progress. Reflection, after all, is a habit of mind and an action that representations of Wheatley Peters herself tend to associate with her writing and her life, …
Continue reading Celebrating Phillis Wheatley Peters in a Participatory Humanities Project
Recognizing the “Mourning” Elements of Thanksgiving alongside Learning Gifts Dennis Zotigh (Kiowa/Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo/Isante Dakota Indian), in a 2011 essay, Thanksgiving from an Indigenous Perspective, updated this November 2022, asks a vital question about how “Native Americans make peace with a national holiday that romanticizes the 1621 encounter between their ancestors and English settlers, and erases …
Every few years, I teach a graduate seminar on "Authorship." I've just begun the latest offering of the course. Preparing for it always involves reading around the topic in a range of ways: exploring memoirs by writers about their craft, revisiting issues of authorship such as copyright and intellectual property, and considering how to promote …
JQA at Stage West Deftly Asks This Question about The Past and Today In March of 2019, Aaron Posner directed the first production of his own 90-minute play about John Quincy Adams (1767-1848), the “other” Adams to serve as US President, like his father John Adams for only one term. That premiere at the Arena …
A hurricane is tearing up New Orleans and much of Louisiana, then spiraling north. COVID hospitalizations are spiking exponentially. Wildfires are tearing up the west coast. Chaos has reigned over the withdrawal from Afghanistan. And what are we humanities-oriented academics (especially English-Department and American Studies types) seemingly talking about most energetically on twitter and beyond? …
Continue reading Why Are Academics So Busily Writing About “The Chair”?
A Poignant Anniversary with Implications for Teaching Phillis Wheatley arrived in Boston from her African homeland 260 years ago this month, in July 1761. Though only about seven or eight years old, she was transported with other captives aboard the Phillis as part of an ongoing push to make slavery central to the economies …
I got a wonderful gift over the winter holiday. A former student, Amanda Davis Closs, wrote me about how a course I taught, and especially a project she worked on in the class--over a decade ago, long before I came to my current job at TCU--has remained important to her. She described how the community …
If once you have slept on an island You’ll never be quite the same; [....] You may sit at home and sew, But you’ll see blue water and wheeling gulls Wherever your feet may go. From a poem by Rachel Field Won’t you help to sing These songs of freedom ‘Cause all I ever have …
Continue reading Flying During Covid-19: Planes, Poems, and Virtual Journeys
Hanging side by side above the imposing entrance to the southwest hall of the Library of Congress (LOC), three large banners announce exhibits currently open there. One is a permanent fixture at the LOC. A recreation of Thomas Jefferson’s impressive home library allows visitors to enter a circle of shelves showcasing the beautiful leather-bound volumes …
Continue reading Revisiting Women’s Suffrage from an Intersectional Perspective
“This star I am wearing is for my husband, a member of the great Sioux Nation, who is a volunteer in Uncle Sam’s Army.” From Gertrude Bonnin (Zitkala-Ša), writing in The American Indian Magazine, in an article on WWI Veterans Day—a day to honor all the women and men who have served as members of …
Continue reading Extending Veterans Day and Spotlighting Native Americans Who Have Served
Sarah Ruffing Robbins 