Programs

NINETEENTH CENTURY AFRICAN AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS

Excluded from positions of power within male-dominated black institutions, nineteenth-century African-American women found platforms for their activism as evangelical preachers, independent travelers, public speakers, and writers of fiction. This presentation by Carla Peterson features women such as Sojourner Truth; religious evangelists Maria Stewart and Jarena Lee; journalist Mary Ann Shadd Cary; lecturer Sarah Parker Remond; slave autobiographer Harriet Jacobs; and poet and essayist Frances Ellen Watkins. Adult audiences.

Carla L. Peterson is Professor of English at the University of Maryland. Her books include “Doers of the Word”: African American Women Speakers and Writers in the North (1830-1880) and The Determined Reader: Gender and Culture in the Novel from Napoleon to Victoria. She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Yale University and her B.A. from Radcliffe College.