Prof. Martha Schoolman (Florida International University, Miami): "Negro Universities Press and the Archives of Abolitionism"

Wednesday, 31.05.2017, 16:15-17.45 Uhr, U7/01.05

This talk examined the brief existence and long material afterlife of the "Negro Universities Press" imprint of the Greenwood Press within the larger context of abolitionist and post-abolitionist print culture. First, it examined abolitionists own self-archiving practices both before and after the civil war, and what critics have made of them. Second, it examined the complex, half-forgotten institutional circumstances that temporarily made the reprinting of abolitionist material into big business, including ventures such as NUP, the traces of which have until very recently constituted the whole of abolitionist archive for a majority of university libraries in the United States.

Martha Schoolman specializes in antebellum US literature and the literary and cultural production surrounding slavery and abolition in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world. She studied at the University of Chicago (A.B.), University of Texas at Austin (M.A.), and the University of Pennsylvania (Ph.D.). She has held fellowships at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University, the American Antiquarian Society, and the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. She is the author of Abolitionist Geographies (Minnesota, 2014) and coeditor with Jared Hickman of the essay collection Abolitionist Places (Routledge, 2013). Her essays and reviews have been published in the Arizona Quarterly, Atlantic Studies, The Cincinnati Review, and ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, where she also serves on the editorial board.