This virtual forum features Jean Lutes, Denise Burgher, Trinity Rogers, and Brigitte Fielder of Taught by Literature, a collaborative digital humanities project that re-centers Black women writers, beginning with the work of African American author and activist Alice Dunbar-Nelson. The speakers will use Dunbar-Nelson’s short story, “His Heart’s Desire” (1900) to explore the challenges scholars face in recovering little-known African American texts when confronted by multiple textual variants, manuscripts without dates, and a readership unfamiliar with an author’s work. A remarkable short story about a boy who wants a doll, “His Heart’s Desire” is one of twelve short stories Dunbar-Nelson wrote in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries about children living in a poor urban neighborhood. The stories were inspired by her work teaching Black kindergarteners at the White Rose Mission in New York City.
Lutes, Burgher, Rogers, and Fielder will discuss Taught by Literature’s comprehensive digital resource for educators based on two different versions of Dunbar-Nelson’s story──the original written during the 1890s and published in a 1900 newspaper and a revision published at a later date──as well as its significance for the histories of boyhood, race, and material culture.
Jean M. Lutes (she/her) is Professor and Luckow Family Endowed Chair of English at Villanova University, where she teaches American literature and Gender and Women’s Studies. She has published essays about Alice Dunbar-Nelson in American Literary History and J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists. She is co-editor, with Jennifer Travis, of Gender in American Literature and Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2021).
Denise Burgher is the senior team leader for curriculum and community engagement at the Colored Conventions Project, where she co-directs Douglass Day at the Center for Black Digital Research at Pennsylvania State University. She is completing her Ph.D. in English at the University of Delaware on Afro-Protestant nineteenth-century women educators in the Colored Conventions Movement. Her work has been supported by a dissertation fellowship at the Library Company of Philadelphia and has appeared in Legacy, The Collective Wisdom Handbook, and in numerous public venues. She is a member of Just Teach One and is a co-founder and co-director of the Black digital humanities project, Taught by Literature, which focuses on the work of Alice Dunbar Nelson and her literary contemporaries.
Trinity Rogers is a recent graduate of Villanova University where she majored in Peace and Justice with minors in Africana Studies and English. While at Villanova, Trinity joined Taught by Literature as a student researcher in August of 2021. Trinity is now a J.D. student at Loyola University Chicago and Taught by Literature’s Program Coordinator.
Brigitte Fielder (she/her) is an Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She writes and teaches about early and nineteenth-century U.S. literature, particularly focusing on African American women writers, and African American children’s literature from the eighteenth-century to the present.