Sharon M. Harris is a feminist literary scholar and cultural historian, and she was the founder and first president of the Society for the Study of American Women Writers. From 1996 to 2004, she edited the society's journal, Legacy , widely considered the premier journal in the field. [1] [2] Harris was also one of the three founders of the Society of Early Americanists. [3] An elected member of the American Antiquarian Society, Harris is the author and editor of numerous books, including Executing Race: Early American Women's Narratives of Race, Society, and the Law (2005) and Dr. Mary Walker, An American Radical (2009). [4] As a key figure in the so-called "recovery" period of the 1980s and 1990s, Harris was initially known for her study of Rebecca Harding Davis, published in 1991. [5] Harris is currently professor emerita at the University of Connecticut. [6]
Harris received her Ph.D. from the University of Washington in 1988, after which she became an assistant professor at Temple University. By 1992, she had moved to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she rose to the rank of professor. Harris briefly held the Lorraine Sherley Professorship in Literature at Texas Christian University before joining the English Department at the University of Connecticut, where she directed the Humanities Institute. [7]
In her 2009 state-of-the-field essay, "'Across the gulf': working in the 'post-recovery' era," Harris suggested that feminist literary and cultural studies have not moved from a "recovery" to a "post-recovery" phase, but rather that feminist recovery work is unfolding in a "multi-phased" way. Calling for a scholarship that bridges connections "across the gulf"—a phrase drawn from Rebecca Harding Davis's 1881 article of the same title—Harris suggests that feminist scholars continue to recover texts written by women, but that this recovery work be theorized in relation to various critical contexts, from labor to religious faith to regionalism to race. Harris writes: "The recovery of women's writings has always been and must continue to be about advancing knowledge once a text has been recovered. Nor can our recovery work simply be of texts: Once a text is "recovered," it must be analyzed through an equally broad compendium of theoretical perspectives, cultural contexts, transatlantic contexts, interdisciplinary contexts, and print and production contexts. That is, the scope of contexts in which we place texts is really what recovery is about, and in that sense our work has and always will have only begun." Taking the US Civil War-era as an example, Harris discusses how scholars must theorize the work of women writers during this period in relation to the economic, religious, racial, and other dimensions of the period. [8]
Rebecca Harding Davis: A Life Among Writers (West Virginia University Press, 2018)
Dr. Mary Walker: An American Radical (Rutgers University Press, 2009)
Executing Race: Early American Women’s Narratives of Race, Society, and the Law (Ohio State University Press, 2005)
Rebecca Harding Davis and American Realism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991)
A Feminist Reader: Feminist Thought from Sappho to Satrapi (Cambridge University Press, 2013) [with Linda K. Hughes]
Rebecca Harding Davis’s Stories of the Civil War Era (University of Georgia Press, 2009) [with Robin Cadwallader]
Letters and Cultural Transformations in the United States, 1760–1860 (Ashgate Publishing, 2009) [with Theresa Strouth Gaul]
Mercy Otis Warren: Selected Letters (University of Georgia Press, 2009)
The Awakening, by Kate Chopin (Bedford-St. Martin's, 2007)
Periodical Literature in Eighteenth-Century America (University of Tennessee Press, 2004)
Blue Pencils and Hidden Hands: Women Editing Periodicals, 1830–1910 (Northeastern University Press, 2004)
Women’s Early American Historical Narratives (Penguin, 2003)
Rebecca Harding Davis: Writing Cultural Autobiography (Vanderbilt University Press, 2001) [with Janice M. Lasseter]
American Women Prose Writers, 1870–1920. Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 221 (Gale, 2000)
American Women Writers to 1800: An Oxford Anthology (Oxford University Press, 1996)
Selected Writings of Judith Sargent Murray. Women Writers in English to 1830 Series (Oxford University Press, 1995)
Redefining the Political Novel: American Women Writers 1797–1901. (University of Tennessee Press, 1995)
Gloria Jean Watkins, better known by her pen name bell hooks, was an American author, theorist, educator, and social critic who was a Distinguished Professor in Residence at Berea College. She was best known for her writings on race, feminism, and class. She used the lower-case spelling of her name to decenter herself and draw attention to her work instead. The focus of hooks' writing was to explore the intersectionality of race, capitalism, and gender, and what she described as their ability to produce and perpetuate systems of oppression and class domination. She published around 40 books, including works that ranged from essays, poetry, and children's books. She published numerous scholarly articles, appeared in documentary films, and participated in public lectures. Her work addressed love, race, social class, gender, art, history, sexuality, mass media, and feminism.
Womanism is a term originating from the work of African American author Alice Walker in her 1983 book In Search of Our Mother's Garden, denoting a movement within feminism, primarily championed by Black feminists. Walker coined the term "womanist" in the short story Coming Apart in 1979. Her initial use of the term evolved to envelop a spectrum of issues and perspectives facing black women and others.
Life in the Iron Mills is a short story written by Rebecca Harding Davis in 1861, set in the factory world of the nineteenth century. It is one of the earliest American realist works, and is an important text for those who study labor and women's issues. It was immediately recognized as an innovative work, and introduced American readers to "the bleak lives of industrial workers in the mills and factories of the nation."
Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa was an American scholar of Chicana feminism, cultural theory, and queer theory. She loosely based her best-known book, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), on her life growing up on the Mexico–Texas border and incorporated her lifelong experiences of social and cultural marginalization into her work. She also developed theories about the marginal, in-between, and mixed cultures that develop along borders, including on the concepts of Nepantla, Coyoxaulqui imperative, new tribalism, and spiritual activism. Her other notable publications include This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981), co-edited with Cherríe Moraga.
Rebecca Blaine Harding Davis was an American author and journalist. She was a pioneer of literary realism in American literature. She graduated valedictorian from Washington Female Seminary in Pennsylvania. Her most important literary work is the short story "Life in the Iron-Mills," published in the April 1861 edition of The Atlantic Monthly. Throughout her lifetime, Davis sought to effect social change for African Americans, women, Native Americans, immigrants, and the working class, by intentionally writing about the plight of these marginalized groups in the 19th century.
Mabelle Massey Segrest, known as Mab Segrest, is an American lesbian feminist, writer, scholar and activist. Segrest is best known for her 1994 autobiographical work Memoir of a Race Traitor, which won the Editor's Choice Lambda Literary Award. Segrest is the former Fuller-Matthai Professor of Gender and Women's Studies at Connecticut College.
Intersectionality is a sociological analytical framework for understanding how groups' and individuals' social and political identities result in unique combinations of discrimination and privilege. Examples of these factors include gender, caste, sex, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, religion, disability, height, age, weight and physical appearance. These intersecting and overlapping social identities may be both empowering and oppressing. However, little good-quality quantitative research has been done to support or undermine the practical uses of intersectionality.
Standpoint theory, also known as standpoint epistemology, is a foundational framework in social theory that examines how individuals' unique perspectives, shaped by their social and political experiences, influence their understanding of the world. Standpoint theory proposes that authority is rooted in individuals' personal knowledge and perspectives and the power that such authority exerts.
Barbara T. Christian was an American author and professor of African-American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Among several books, and over 100 published articles, Christian was most well known for the 1980 study Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition.
Jane Marcus (1938–2015) was a pioneering feminist literary scholar, specializing in women writers of the Modernist era, but especially in the social and political context of their writings. Focusing on Virginia Woolf, Rebecca West, and Nancy Cunard, among many others, she devised groundbreaking analyses of Woolf's writings, upending a generation of criticism that ignored feminist, pacifist, and socialist themes in much of Woolf's work and critique of imperialism and bourgeois society. Marcus's understanding of Woolf's place within the larger context of English literature has become prevailing wisdom today in the fields affected by her theorization and research, despite the controversial nature of her positions when they were originally formulated and how much opposition she garnered from earlier scholars and critics.
The Feminist Press at CUNY is an American independent nonprofit literary publisher of the City University of New York, based in New York City. It primarily publishes feminist literature that promotes freedom of expression and social justice.
Angela P. Harris is an American legal scholar at UC Davis School of Law, in the fields of critical race theory, feminist legal scholarship, and criminal law. She held the position of professor of law at UC Berkeley School of Law, joining the faculty in 1988. In 2009, Harris joined the faculty of the State University of New York at Buffalo Law School as a visiting professor. In 2010, she also assumed the role of acting vice dean for research and faculty development. In 2011, she accepted an offer to join the faculty at the UC Davis School of Law, and began teaching as a professor of law in the 2011–12 academic year.
Feminist theory in composition studies examines how gender, language, and cultural studies affect the teaching and practice of writing. It challenges the traditional assumptions and methods of composition studies and proposes alternative approaches that are informed by feminist perspectives. Feminist theory in composition studies covers a range of topics, such as the history and development of women’s writing, the role of gender in rhetorical situations, the representation and identity of writers, and the pedagogical implications of feminist theory for writing instruction. Feminist theory in composition studies also explores how writing can be used as a tool for empowerment, resistance, and social change. Feminist theory in composition studies emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s as a response to the male-dominated field of composition and rhetoric. It has been influenced by various feminist movements and disciplines, such as second-wave feminism, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, critical race theory, and queer theory. Feminist theory in composition studies has contributed to the revision of traditional rhetorical concepts, the recognition of diverse voices and genres, the promotion of collaborative and ethical communication, and the integration of personal and political issues in writing.
Sara Ahmed is a British-Australian writer and scholar whose area of study includes the intersection of feminist theory, lesbian feminism, queer theory, affect theory, critical race theory and postcolonialism. Her seminal work, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, in which she explores the social dimension and circulation of emotions, is recognized as a foundational text in the nascent field of affect theory.
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Donald E. Pease is the Ted and Helen Geisel Third Century Professor in the Humanities, chair of the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies Program, professor of English and comparative literature at Dartmouth College. He is an Americanist, literary and cultural critic, and academic. He has been a member of the boundary 2 editorial collective since 1977 or 1978. He was the founding editor of the New Americanists series at Duke University Press and editor of the Re-Encountering Colonialism Series and Re-Mapping the Transnational Turn: A Dartmouth Series in American Studies for the University Press of New England (UPNE). Pease directs the annual Futures of American Studies Institute at Dartmouth.
Duchess Harris is Special Assistant to the Provost for Strategic Initiatives at Macalester College. She is an African-American academic, author, and legal scholar. She is a professor of American Studies at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesota, specializing in feminism, United States law, and African American political movements. She also teaches a course on Black Health at the University of Minnesota Law School.
Joanne Schultz Frye is a Professor Emerita of English and Women's Studies at the College of Wooster. Frye is known for her feminist literary criticism and interdisciplinary inquiry into motherhood. She specializes in research on fiction by and about women, such as the work of Virginia Woolf, Tillie Olsen, and Jane Lazarre.
Feminist rhetoric emphasizes the narratives of all demographics, including women and other marginalized groups, into the consideration or practice of rhetoric. Feminist rhetoric does not focus exclusively on the rhetoric of women or feminists, but instead prioritizes the feminist principles of inclusivity, community, and equality over the classic, patriarchal model of persuasion that ultimately separates people from their own experience. Seen as the act of producing or the study of feminist discourses, feminist rhetoric emphasizes and supports the lived experiences and histories of all human beings in all manner of experiences. It also redefines traditional delivery sites to include non-traditional locations such as demonstrations, letter writing, and digital processes, and alternative practices such as rhetorical listening and productive silence. According to author and rhetorical feminist Cheryl Glenn in her book Rhetorical Feminism and This Thing Called Hope (2018), "rhetorical feminism is a set of tactics that multiplies rhetorical opportunities in terms of who counts as a rhetor, who can inhabit an audience, and what those audiences can do." Rhetorical feminism is a strategy that counters traditional forms of rhetoric, favoring dialogue over monologue and seeking to redefine the way audiences view rhetorical appeals.
Sharon Hartman Strom is an American historian, women's studies scholar, educator, and writer. She is known for her work in United States 19th and 20th-century history, including the study of women’s rights, sexuality, labor, race, and gender. Strom is a Professor Emerita of History at University of Rhode Island.