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
- 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.
- 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.
