Here are highlights from students’ public projects, part of our commitment to sharing our knowledge. Please also check out our blog, with responses to, interpretations of, and bibliographies for the texts we read and discussed in class.
Exhibitions
Our class produced content for two exhibitions: a digital exhibition intended for this site and contributions to an upcoming in-person exhibition at the Homewood Museum. For the former, students selected texts we had read in class, elaborating on their production and meaning. For the latter, students researched works by and about girls and women that the women of Homewood might have had access to in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Since the Homewood exhibition opening has been deferred until 2021, those student contributions are also posted here.
Please click on the links below to learn more. Top to bottom, left to right:
- Victoria Woodhull, A Lecture on Constitutional Equality, by Lara Uthman, Class of 2021.
- Sui Sin Far, Mrs. Spring Fragrance, by Haley O’brion, Class of 2021.
- Phillis Wheatley, Poems on Various Subjects, by Rudy Malcom, Class of 2021.
- Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince, Related by Herself, by Anna Leoncio, Class of 2020.
- Alice Duer Miller, Are Women People?, by Sophia Lola, Class of 2022.
- Lydia Maria Child, The Girl’s Own Book, by Samantha Fu, Class of 2021.
- Herman Mann, The Female Review: The Life of Deborah Sampson, by Julia Costacurta, Class of 2020.
- Catharine Beecher, The Evils Suffered by American Women and American Children, by Erin Baggs, Class of 2020.
- Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman, “The Yellow Wall-Paper”, by Addy Perlman, Class of 2021.
Transcriptions and translations
Students brought their skills as readers of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writing by women to several crowd-sourced transcription projects focused on women’s suffrage and rights more generally, such as those hosted by the Library of Congress, the National Archives, and Virginia Memory. Some students instead designed their own transcription and translation projects.
Top to bottom, left to right:
- Edith Wharton, “Les Marocaines chez elles,” in Revue des deux mondes, May-June 1918, an untranslated essay. Photo of the Palace of the Bahia, Marrakech, by Felix, from Edith Wharton, In Morocco (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1920) via Project Gutenberg. Translation by Nandan Kulkarni, Class of 2022.
- Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson, letter to Robert Louis Stevenson, Jan? 1883. From the Robert Louis Stevenson Collection, Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University. Transcription by Riya Rana, Class of 2020.
- Alice Stone Blackwell, translation of Spanish-American poems. From the Blackwell Family Papers, 1848-1957, Alice Stone Blackwell Papers, 1870-1957, Library of Congress. Transcription by Hayley O’brion, Class of 2021.
- Alexander Park document from arrival case file, from the Immigration Arrival Investigation Case Files, 1884-1944. Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, National Archives. Chinese Heritage Records from the Chinese Exclusion Act Era. Transcription by Samantha Fu, Class of 2021.
- Letter from A. Beeman Bedrosian to Alice Stone Blackwell, April 20, 1895. From the Blackwell Family Papers, 1848-1957, Alice Stone Blackwell General Correspondence, Library of Congress. Transcription by Rudy Malcom, Class of 2021.
Social media
In order to bring the works and biographies of the writers we studied out into the world beyond the classroom, students adapted them to social media, with posts and content on YouTube, Reddit, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. Here are some examples.
- Dickinson vs. the Publishers, a YouTube video by Eric Yoo, Class of 2021.
- Discussion about Sui Sin Far on the Reddit channel r/feministtheory, by Gia Squitieri, Class of 2020.
- A series on Facebook, with posts about Louisa May Alcott, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Alice Dunbar Nelson, by Jackie Gladden, Class of 2020. (Image: Addison Scurlock, portrait of Alice Dunbar Nelson, circa 1915. From MSS 0113, Alice Dunbar-Nelson papers, Special Collections, University of Delaware Library, Newark, Delaware. Permission pending.)
- An Instagram story connecting Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman’s story “The Yellow Wall-Paper” to The Yellow Wallpaper, an exhibition of portraits by the painter Kehinde Wiley at the William Morris Gallery in London, by Addy Perlman, Class of 2021.
SCRIBBLING WOMEN 