The Taught by Literature team has launched “Lifting Their Voices,” a series of short videos featuring contemporary Black women educators — including the English Department's own Dr. Crystal Lucky! — reading aloud texts by Black women intellectuals of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries.
Villanova faculty, students (both undergraduate and graduate), and scholars from outside Villanova worked together on this public humanities project, funded in part by a grant from the College of Arts and Sciences and the McNulty Institute's Idol Family Fellows Program. In each video, a reader shares a short historical text and reflects on its personal significance and relevance today. Along with the video series, TBL has produced a set of free curricular materials for middle school and high school teachers to help them bring the rich history and literature of Black women into their classrooms. Villanova students created the curricular materials and are now leading efforts to share these resources with public school teachers, with the goal of making underrepresented voices more widely available in an array of educational spaces.
