Lives, Writings and Legacies of Phillis Wheatley Peters

Barbara McCaskill is Distinguished Research Professor of English and a faculty affiliate of Women’s Studies and African American Studies at the University of Georgia. She is also Associate Academic Director of the Willson Center for Humanities & Arts. In 2023, she co-organized 'The Genius of Phillis Wheatley Peters' public humanities project with Sarah Ruffing Robbins and Mona Narain. She has authored, edited or co-edited numerous books on African American and Ethnic American Literature, including African American Literature in Transition, 1880-1900 with Caroline Gebhard (forthcoming 2026); The Magnificent Rev. Peter Thomas Stanford with Sidonia Serafini (2020) and her monograph, Love, Liberation, and Escaping Slavery: William and Ellen Craft in Culture Memory (2015). She serves as co-P.I. with Nicholas Allen of Culture and Community at the Penn Center National Historic Landmark District, a multi-year, multi-institutional grant consisting of student residencies, community fellows, an artist-in-residence, and public conversations, and funded by the Mellon Foundation. Sarah Ruffing Robbins is Lorraine Sherley Professor of English at Texas Christian University. She co-directed 'The Genius of Phillis Wheatley Peters' public humanities project with Barbara McCaskill and Mona Narain and oversees the project website. Her current book projects include a monograph on public humanities in action that uses cultural memory-making around Wheatley Peters across time as a case study. She has published a dozen academic books and led numerous grant-funded public humanities projects. Her single-author books include Learning Legacies: Archive to Action through Women’s Cross-Cultural Teaching (2017); The Cambridge Introduction to Harriet Beecher Stowe (2007); and the Choice Award-winning Managing Literacy, Mothering America (2004). With historian Ann Pullen, she co-edited the award-winning critical edition of Nellie Arnott’s Writings on Angola (2011). She co-edited Transatlantic Anglophone Literatures, 1776-1920 (EUP, 2022) with Linda Hughes and Andrew Taylor and Teaching Transatlanticism (EUP, 2015) with Hughes; she has directed a companion website for those pedagogy-focused publications, Teaching Transatlanticism. With Andrew Taylor and Christopher Hanlon, she co-edits Edinburgh University Press’s 'Interventions in Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture' book series. Mona Narain is Professor of English at Texas Christian University and a faculty affiliate in Asian Studies and Women & Gender Studies. She specialises in British literature of the long eighteenth-century (1660-1830) and British Asian Literature, (Post) Colonial Studies, and the literatures of Diasporas and the Global South. She is the Scholarship Editor of ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1660-1830, and book series co-editor of 'Transits: Literature, Culture and Thought, 1650-1850'. Her current research focuses on oceanic connections between the Global South, the Black Atlantic, and colonialism. Other select publications include a journal special issue on 'Asians/Asia: Provocations' and 'Postcolonial Revisions of the Early Modern'; a co-edited book, Gender and Space in British Literature, 1660-1820 (2014); an essay on British Indian writers in The Cambridge History of Black and Asian British Writing (2020); and several peer-reviewed articles in scholarly journals such as ELH, Studies in Romanticism and Literature Compass. She serves on the advisory boards of the journal Eighteenth Century Fiction and the 'Early Modern Feminisms' books series.

There has never been a better time to be a scholar of Phillis Wheatley Peters, as this extraordinary volume shows. The Lives, Writings and Legacies of Phillis Wheatley Peters is a tribute to the genius and enduring power of one of our greatest poets.

• List of FiguresAcknowledgmentsCo-editors and ContributorsNote on Our Editing PatternsIntroduction: Phillis Wheatley Peters as Cultural TouchstoneSarah Ruffing Robbins, Barbara McCaskill and Mona NarainPart I. Representing Life ExperiencesLead section editor: Sarah Ruffing Robbins1. Wheatley’s Black Women Literary PredecessorsCassander L. Smith2. Lore and Longing in Two Biographical Versions of Phillis WheatleySarah Ruffing Robbins 3. Searching for Phillis Wheatley PetersVincent Carretta4. Phillis Wheatley Peters, DiplomatHollis Robbins and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. 5. Finding a Face for Phillis: Portraying Phillis Wheatley Peters in SculptureMeredith Bergmann6. Staging Wheatley Peters: An InterviewAde Solanke with the Volume’s Co-editorsPart II. Literary CriticismLead section editor: Mona Narain7. Snatching the Laurel: or, Transgressing the Limits of Literary Patronage in the Eighteenth Century James Edward Ford III 8. The Blood of Christians: Phillis Wheatley and White ChristianityKimberly Anne Coles9. Wheatley and the Spiritual Stakes of Transatlantic MovementDavid Mark Diamond10. Phillis and the OceansMona Narain11. “Suspend the Sigh, dear Sir”: Politics of Voice and Address in Two Elegies by Phillis Wheatley PetersKatarina Stenke12. With and Without Her: Placing Phillis Wheatley Peters’s Poems “On the Death of Love Rotch” and “The Black Rose”Wendy Raphael RobertsPart III. Afterlives and CommunitiesLead section editor: Barbara McCaskill13. Embodied Archives and Revived Legacies in Favored by the Muses: A Multidisciplinary, Research-Based PerformanceGeorge Contini14. Wake Work and the Afterlives of Phillis Wheatley’s Poetrydrea brown 15. Copies, Collections, Communities: Wheatley’s Poems on Display in St AndrewsJahzel Asi, Elizabeth Henderson and Tom Jones 16. Phillis Wheatley’s Legacy in Five ObjectsBrigitte Fielder and Jonathan Senchyne17. Power to the People: Mary Church Terrell and Margaret Walker Alexander Reclaim the Poet Phillis Wheatley PetersBarbara McCaskill and Seretha D. Williams18. “Midwife to a Movement”: Margaret Walker, Literary Foremother, and the Phillis Wheatley Poetry Festival at Jackson State UniversityEbony Lumumba and Robert LuckettBibliographyIndex