This seminar will center multiethnic American women writers’ engagements with ecological thought over the long nineteenth century. Across novels, poetry, short stories, travel sketches and guides, lectures, and domestic advice and flower manuals, we will explore how women’s literary and cultural productions harnessed the observational sciences—such as natural history, geology, and botany—to assert intellectual agency, articulate conceptions of citizenship and nationhood, negotiate and shape gendered expectations of womanhood, advocate for social, cultural, racial, and environmental justice, and more.
Our major writers will likely include: Jane Johnston Schoolcraft (Ojibwe), Margaret Fuller, Susan Fenimore Cooper, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Lydia Maria Child, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Emily Dickinson, Harriet Prescott Spofford, Constance Fenimore Woolson, and Sarah Orne Jewett. This seminar will also delight in discovery. Through an archival recovery project, we will explore nature poetry collections by overlooked and/or forgotten Black women writers. Further, we will move beyond the bound book to explore the vibrant material culture of the long nineteenth century, from Emily Dickinson’s pressed-flower herbarium to botanical watercolors in Black women’s friendship albums.
M 2-5 p.m.
Spring 2026
Dr. Sidonia Serafini
Image of course flyer, which has the same information as the post.
