PAID STUDENT RESEARCH FELLOW POSITION for SPRING 2022
DESCRIPTION
Undergraduate student sought to join a collaborative, public-facing humanities initiative focused on an understudied Black woman writer, racial justice education, and literary recovery.
EXPECTED TIME COMMITMENT
8-10 hours a week
COMPENSATION TBA, pending grant approval, expected in early January 2022
QUALIFICATIONS
The successful applicant will be intellectually curious, detail-oriented, self-motivated, committed to racial justice, interested in women’s literature and history, and an excellent writer, reader, and communicator. Because this is a long-term project with the possibility of extending the work beyond the Spring 2022 term, preference will be given to first-years and sophomores, although juniors and seniors will also be considered.
HOW TO APPLY
Submit a letter of interest and a resume to Dr. Jean Lutes at jean.lutes@villanova.edu by Jan. 5, 2022.
DETAILS
Dr. Jean Lutes (English department) is looking for a second student to join a team of scholars working on “The ’Steenth Street Project: Recovering Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s Stories of Black Childhood.” This project aims to recover a lost short story collection written in the 1890s by Black author and activist Alice Dunbar-Nelson.
In deference to Dunbar-Nelson’s long career as an educator and advocate for racial justice, the project goal is to produce an open-access digital edition of the story collection, along with curriculum resources and to make our work scalable, relevant, and adaptable to multiple K-12 school systems.
Dr. Lutes and her two collaborators – Dr. Brigitte Fielder (University of Wisconsin) and Ms. Denise Burgher (University of Delaware) – have prioritized collaborating with the Black-majority school district of Philadelphia to collectively produce a text and its accompanying resources, which will bring Dunbar Nelson’s work directly to the people who inspired and shaped the Annals of Steenth street, American children.
The ’Steenth Street stories feature children in a poor urban neighborhood and the middle-class reformers who show up to help -- and who often misunderstand and misstep. The collection is based on Dunbar-Nelson’s work teaching Black kindergarteners at the White Rose Mission in the 1890s in New York City.
The Student Research Fellow hired in Spring 2022 will help 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), to compare story versions to establish a definitive text, to conduct original archival work for the introduction to the edition, and to identify historical documents to be published as appendices to draw the reader into the world of the author and the text.
