"The fellows in the Idol Family Fellowship Program are: Denise Burgher, ABD, English, University of Delaware; African American Public Humanities Initiative and Colored Conventions Project Fellow, Brigitte Fielder, associate professor, University of Wisconsin-Madison; author, Relative Races: Genealogies of Interracial Kinship in Nineteenth-Century America (Duke University Press, 2020), Jean Lutes, Luckow Family Endowed Chair of English Literature, Villanova University; with Student Affiliate Fellows: Kashae Garland, English and Criminology major, Villanova Class of 2022, Cynthia Choo, English and Humanities double major and Education minor Class of 2023 and Trinity Rogers, Peace & Justice Major, Class of 2024.
Their project: The ’Steenth Street Project: Recovering Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s Stories of Black Childhood. This public-facing humanities project aims to recover a lost short story collection written in the 1890s by Black author and activist Alice Dunbar-Nelson, based on her experience teaching Black kindergarteners at the White Rose Mission in New York City. “The Annals of ‘Steenth Street,” as Dunbar-Nelson titled the planned collection, features the youngest residents of a city neighborhood targeted for uplift by Progressive-era reformers. It chronicles a vibrant community where poverty, neglect, domestic violence, limited access to education, and untreated illnesses make it difficult for people to thrive.
We are collaborating with the Black-majority School District of Philadelphia to bring Dunbar-Nelson’s work directly to the people who inspired and shaped “The Annals of ‘Steenth Street,” American children.
In deference to Dunbar-Nelson’s long career as an educator and advocate for racial justice, our goal is to produce a widely accessible digital edition along with curriculum resources and to make our work scalable, relevant, and adaptable to multiple K-12 school systems as well as college classrooms."
They have completed the first of three professional development sessions on teaching Black women writers to Philadelphia School District teachers and have an upcoming event at the Paul Robeson House in Philly in late February.
