Jean Fagan Yellin

Jean Yellin died July 19, 2023. A historian of nineteenth-century America and professor emerita at Pace University, where she began teaching in 1968, Yellin was best known for discovering Harriet Jacobs’s authorship of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, which has since achieved canonical status in American literature. Yellin’s subsequent book, Harriet Jacobs: A Life (2004), won the Frederick Douglass Prize and the William Sanders Scarborough Prize of the Modern Language Association. Yellin cowrote with her husband, Ed Yellin, In Contempt: Defending Free Speech, Defeating HUAC (2022), recounting their decade-long struggle after he refused to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1958.