2023 marked the sesquicentennial of the publication of Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (London 1773), the first known book of poetry published by a woman of African descent in what would become the United States. We co-organized many in-person, virtual, and hybrid events from January 2023 through the 2023-24 academic year to commemorate this milestone. As our initiative developed, we sparked multidisciplinary conversations and catalyzed campus and community partnerships that will extend well beyond our programming cycle. This session will thus assess challenges surmounted and opportunities forged by several representative examples of the events we organized. We will contribute the expertise we gained and lessons learned to the national conversation about how public humanities projects can demonstrate the value of what we do to constituencies beyond the academy. By revisiting how we have been collaboratively shaping meanings of the life and times of Wheatley Peters, in cross-institutional and cross-disciplinary public partnerships, we will encourage similar endeavors among MLA participants and offer outcomes of our work as a blueprint for them.
Throughout the initiative spotlighted in our session, connections with traditional scholarship enhanced our public events, such as in two sessions tied to Vincent Carretta’s updated biography. Relatedly, our website highlights how recent works like Carretta’s and David Waldstreicher’s have yielded archival materials providing insight into Wheatley Peters’ African childhood, marriage and motherhood in freedom, entrepreneurial decisions to publicize her scholarship, and other aspects of her life in bondage and liberty that have previously been misunderstood. Where gaps and silences remain, creative works by such writers as Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Adeola Solanke, and drea brown (also celebrated on our website) have imagined the poet’s circumstances. The special issue of Early American Literature, co-edited by Tara Bynum, Cassie Smith, and Brigitte Fielder, as well as virtual programming by archives and libraries such as the American Antiquarian Society and the Library Company of Philadelphia, have electrified interest in Wheatley Peters, including her transatlantic networks, her Islamic retentions, her agency as an enslaved yet literate Black woman, her management of authorship, and her complicated engagement with Enlightenment philosophy and Christian faith. What our special session offers is a demonstration of how public humanities projects such as the “Genius of Phillis Wheatley Peters” can amplify the reach and accessibility of such scholarship and empower audiences to move beyond consuming knowledge to shaping it through conversations, collaborations, and partnerships.
We have structured the session to allow for maximum discussion time between audience members and participants. Each of the roundtable’s speakers (Robbins, Wolverton, brown, Fielder, Narain, Mccaskill) will take no more than eight minutes (forty-eight total) to outline their participation in The Genius of Phillis Wheatley Peters (PWP) programming and its relationship to their larger work as publicly engaged scholars. The remaining twenty-seven minutes will be dedicated to conversation with the audience.
Key talking points:
Robbins: PWP project overview; Wolverton: American Antiquarian Society Zoom event and its link to ongoing AAS public programming; brown: September workshop with schoolteachers and public poetry reading and connections with her creative writing and teaching; Fielder: presentation for family literacy event and its link to her publication agenda and exhibition at the University of Wisconsin; Narain: Publishing PWP pedagogy globally via open access ABO special teaching cluster; McCaskill: community-building through this and other initiatives.
This session incorporates a diversity of voices. We include speakers based across many states and employed by a range of institutions: R-1 and mid-tier state universities (University of Georgia, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Texas State University), one private university (TCU), and an archives and educational institution (the American Antiquarian Society). drea brown brings added diversity as a creative, as well as a critical, writer; many of us have editorial and administrative as well as authorial experience; and we are mid-career to senior professionals.