Just Published! English Major Isabel Forward's Slate Article on her Trip to the US-Mexico Border

Congratulations to English Major Isabel Forward ('20), whose beautiful, moving account of her recent stay volunteering at an Annunciation House shelter for immigrants on the US-Mexico Border was published in Slate on Sunday.

You can read her article here: Migrants at the Border Have Lost Their Dignity

Opportunity to do Paid Work for Dr. Lutes's Undergraduate Research Team

Want to get experience as a research assistant while helping to recover the fiction of an important Black woman writer from the turn of the twentieth century?

If so, apply to join a three-student research team that will undertake an exciting literary recovery project led by an English Department faculty member.

Application deadline Aug. 1, 2019

Applicants do not need substantial experience. Although English majors are welcome to apply, highly motivated undergraduates from any field of study will be considered for these positions.

If selected, students will conduct research under the supervision of Jean Lutes, associate professor in the Department of English, for 10 hours per week for 10 weeks in both fall and spring semesters, for which they will receive a $1000 a semester.

Applicants must be available to work in both fall and spring terms.

HOW TO APPLY

1. Submit a resume and cover letter by Aug. 1, 2019 to directly to Jean Lutes at jean.lutes@villanova.edu.
• Please include in your one-page resume your current GPA (first-year students should include their high school GPA and SAT/ACT scores), as well as any relevant academic and professional experiences and skills.
• Please include in your one-page cover letter your motivations and qualifications for this research assistantship.
• To learn more about cover letter and resume writing, review the Cover Letter & Resume Templates & Tips available on the website for the Center for Research and Fellowships’s Villanova Match Research Program.
2. Dr. Lutes will review all application materials (resume and cover letter) and will contact finalists for a Skype interview in mid-August.

POSITION DETAILS

If you are chosen as a member of the three-student research team, you will:

• Gain experience working as part of a research team in a collaborative effort.

• Conduct primary historical and literary research using both microfilm and digitized sources, with a special emphasis on the rigors of accurate textual editing.

• Find, sort, and synthesize scholarly work on a range of subjects, including relevant histories of childhood, poverty, racial violence, gender and sexual norms, reformist work in poor urban neighborhoods, and African American women’s contributions to literary history.

• Travel together with Dr. Lutes and the other team members to visit the Dunbar-Nelson Papers at the University of Delaware for hands-on experience during a two-day research trip and present your research findings in a precise, accessible, and logical manner.

PROJECT DETAILS

This project is funded by the UNITAS Faculty Research Program in the Office of the Provost.

It involves undergraduate students at a critical stage in a literary recovery project featuring an African American woman writer whose extraordinary voice has not achieved the wide readership it deserves.  With the help of the student research team, Dr. Lutes will prepare a formal proposal to produce a first-ever critical edition of an unpublished short story collection, written between 1899 and 1901, by Alice Dunbar-Nelson, a journalist, poet, fiction writer, dramatist, memoirist, and educator whose extensive archive is housed at the University of Delaware.

The proposal has been solicited by the co-editors of Regenerations: African American Literature and Culture, a distinguished West Virginia University Press series devoted to reprinting editions of important African American texts that have either fallen out of print or have failed to receive the attention they deserve. The students will work with Dr. Lutes to document the publication history of the 12 stories in the collection (several were published both independently, both during Dunbar-Nelson’s lifetime and after), compare versions to establish a definitive text, conduct original archival work for the introduction to the edition, and identify historical documents to be published as appendices to draw the reader into the world of the author and the text.

Because Dunbar-Nelson’s remarkable archive is housed so close to Villanova, only a little more than an hour’s drive away in the University of Delaware’s Department of Special Collections, it offers a unique research opportunity to engage with an important and challenging voice that has not been included in American literary history in a substantive way. Although the Dunbar-Nelson archive has received more scholarly attention in the last two decades than previously, it remains tragically understudied. Dunbar-Nelson left behind an unusually rich written record of her imagination, her views on local and global politics, her personal life, and her voracious reading habits, but she has been mostly ignored by literary critics.

The stories in the unfinished collection Dr. Lutes proposes to resurrect typify the kind of writing that has failed to engage scholars of literature. In addition to their brevity and presumed slightness of topic, the stories defy the widespread expectation that African American authors like Dunbar-Nelson would and should depict African American perspectives almost exclusively. They feature racially ambiguous children and are preoccupied, on the surface at least, with gender and socioeconomic differences instead of racial ones. They were inspired by Dunbar-Nelson’s work teaching kindergarten to poor African American children in New York City in 1897-98 at the White Rose Mission, a settlement house for African American women. Intended to be titled “The Annals of ’Steenth Street,” the story collection features vividly imagined children and parents living in poverty in an urban neighborhood. The stories are funny at times, devastating at others. As a whole, the collection meditates with startling prescience on childhood, class and racial privilege, gender norms, and the not-so-hidden costs of accepting help from charity institutions, which often act as agents of the state. It explores the relationship between the children, their struggling parents, and the Progressive-Era reformers who move into their neighborhood to provide education and social services through the fictional Pure in Heart Mission, a name so aspirational that it’s hard not to read it as Dunbar-Nelson’s ironic commentary on both the reformers and the children they seek to help.

Dunbar-Nelson identified powerfully with the African American community, and she was married (albeit briefly) to the most famous African American poet of her era, Paul Laurence Dunbar. “Dunbar-Nelson’s own race was never masked from her readers,” as Katherine Adams, Caroline Gebhard, and Sandra A. Zagarell—the astute editors of a 2016 special issue of Legacy; Journal of American Women Writers featuring Dunbar-Nelson—remind us (239).  Still, as a bisexual woman of color, Dunbar-Nelson never fit neatly into the categories scholars have used to justify their attention to writers from underrepresented groups. At times, she has been dismissed for not embracing a consistent group identity, a deliberate choice that some scholars have attributed to her keen awareness of the dangers of group identification and her “refusal to make a piety” of belonging to any group, racial or otherwise (Adams and Zagarell with Gebhard, 240-241). To even begin to understand the significance of Dunbar-Nelson’s work and why it has been so readily forgotten, then, it is necessary to confront racial, gender, and economic differences directly, and to consider carefully the costs of inclusion as well as exclusion.