A nineteenth-century tunnel book inspires us to adopt different perspectives on settler colonial regimes and power structures.  This second part in the diptych series on comparative settler colonialisms begins with an object lesson based in London about imperial gazes on different colonial landscapes. This episode features Dr. Xine Yao in conversation with Dr. T.J. Tallie, an Assistant Professor at the University of San Diego and author of Queering Colonial Natal: Indigeneity and the Violence of Belonging in Southern Africa (University of Minnesota Press, 2019).  Tallie’s focus on nineteenth-century settler colonial histories in a region of what is now South Africa provides insight into structures of settler colonialism and ways to consider relationships between queerness, Indigeneity, and Blackness.  This episode was produced by Melissa Gniadek (University of Toronto) and Xine Yao (University College London). Additional production support was provided by Rachel Boccio (LaGuardia Community College/CUNY), Chelsea Latremouille (University of Toronto), and Stephanie Redekop (University of Toronto). Full episode transcript here: http://bit.ly/C19PodcastS04E04

Episode links:

The tunnel book at the Victoria and Albert Museum:
https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O1362044/view-from-langostura-de-paine-paper-peepshow-callcott-maria/

T.J. Tallie’s book:
https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/queering-colonial-natal

S04E04 | Comparative Settler Colonialisms (II): African Indigeneity and Southern Africa as Colony

The coronavirus pandemic in 2020 resulted in not only a devastating loss of life, but a loss of jobs too. As the virus swept the United States, so too did unemployment. What Americans experienced last year during the pandemic was unprecedented in some ways, but the link between crises in health and employment is nothing new. To gain some historical perspective on our most recent epidemic of unemployment, this episode travels back to the depressions of the late nineteenth century to uncover how American economists and thinkers used metaphors of contagious disease to first conceptualize what it meant to be unemployed. Produced by Hillary Roegelein (University of Maryland, College Park), a specialist in nineteenth-century American literature and unemployment history, this episode raises historical and philosophical questions about the advantages of and limitations to thinking about unemployment as a disease. Roegelein is joined by two other scholars of nineteenth-century American culture. Sari Altschuler (Northeastern University) turns to the Cholera outbreak of the 1840s to offer insight into the way pandemics repeatedly give rise to major shifts in cultural, economic, and intellectual thought. And Historian Richard White (Stanford University) explains the history of unemployment and its conceptual development in the United States before 1930. Additional production support was provided by Paul Fess (La Guardia Community College, CUNY). Full episode transcript available here: https://bit.ly/C19PodcastS04E07

S04E07 | The Disease of Unemployment: Nineteenth-Century Perspectives on Today’s Ailing Economy

This episode highlights the ways that librarians and faculty can partner in designing assignments that draw on archival records to emphasize the cultural, political, and social significance of nineteenth-century literary texts. Specifically, we explore the affordances of using archival records, particularly bills of sale for enslaved people, to teach Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Wake Forest University English faculty and Special Collections and Archives librarians talk about the discoveries students make through assignments that allow them to incorporate nineteenth-century historical documents from slavery into their reading and analysis of Jacobs’s narrative. We also consider the significant emotional challenges that this kind of direct material engagement poses, discussing the ways we have presented and revised our assignments to account for potentially traumatic triggering. Episode produced by Carrie Johnston (Digital Humanities Research Designer), Rian Bowie (Associate Teaching Professor of English), Megan Mulder (Special Collections Librarian), Tanya Zanish-Belcher (Director of Special Collections and Archives) and Brianna Derr (Wake Forest University Information Systems). Additional production support from Doug Guerra (SUNY Oswego). Full episode transcript with additional links available here: https://bit.ly/C19PodcastS04E08

S04E08 | Teaching Harriet Jacobs in the Archives

Everybody knows Walt Whitman (1819-1892) as the poet of Leaves of Grass (1855), but only a few think of him as a newspaperman. Still, Whitman’s journalistic writings are not only more numerous than his poetic output, but they also attracted more readers for much of his career. This podcast episode looks at one of Walt Whitman’s jobs in journalism: his editorial post at the Brooklyn Daily Times in the late 1850s, after he had already published two unsuccessful editions of Leaves of Grass. 

The extent of Whitman’s writings for the Times is hotly debated, with scholarly assessments ranging from “no association” to “wrote most editorials for multiple years.” In this episode, Dr. Matt Cohen (University of Nebraska—Lincoln), one of the co-directors of the Walt Whitman Archive, interviews Whitman researchers Drs. Stephanie M. Blalock (University of Iowa Libraries), Kevin McMullen (University of Nebraska—Lincoln), Stefan Schöberlein (Texas A&M University—Central Texas), and Jason Stacy (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville) who have been trying to identify and track Whitman’s anonymous writings in that paper for a collaborative grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Their conversation not only engages with scholarly issues relating to authorship attribution, antebellum newspaper culture, and Whitman biography but also features excerpts of newly discovered writings by Whitman—on topics as disparate as prostitution, policing, and public works. Additional production support provided by Lizzy LeRud (Georgia Institute of Technology). Transcript available at https://bit.ly/S05E05-Transcript.

C19 Podcast Season 5

S05E05 | Finding Whitman Between the Columns: A Trip Into Nineteenth-Century Newsprint

Every week, back in 2018, Ivy Schweitzer and her team of students at Dartmouth College selected several poems and letters written by Emily Dickinson in 1862, a year of creativity “at the White Heat.” They framed these poems with a summary of the news of the time, literary culture, biographical events in the Dickinson circle, a brief survey of more recent critical responses, and personal reflection. This episode explores that cumulative creation, called the “White Heat” blog. The project, which had the goal of creating original and immersive contexts in which to read Dickinson remains an exemplar of digital humanities pedagogy. Members of the team, including Schweitzer, Victoria Corwin, a (then) senior undergraduate, and Joe Waring, a Dartmouth graduate, talk with Michael Amico (Center for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development) about their experiences blogging Dickinson in what the team regards as an experiment in public humanities and a model for doing scholarship and experiential learning in the digital age. This episode originally appeared on September 28, 2018. It was produced by Michael Amico and Conrad Winslow. Post-production help from Doug Guerra. You can visit the White Heat blog at https://journeys.dartmouth.edu/whiteheat/.

C19 Podcast

“Best of” the C19 Podcast | Networked Connections: Exploring Emily Dickinson

The N-word is here to stay, and so are debates about it. However, scholars and teachers don’t need the word to disappear so much as they need to be more deliberate and intellectually rigorous in handling it. In this episode, Koritha Mitchell (Ohio State University) suggests that students and faculty members should not be subjected to hate speech in the classroom just because it appears in the texts we study. She shares her deep disappointment with how little white instructors as well as those in other dominant identity categories have thought about their use of slurs in their classes and proposes solutions to improve pedagogical practices. She details her own classroom policies and offers examples of how the policies function in texts by Mark Twain and James Baldwin. We also hear Mitchell's former students discuss how her policy transformed their learning experiences and critical thinking during and beyond her courses. Throughout, Mitchell identifies how intellectually lazy ways of handing racial slurs result from, and fuel, that which makes our institutions unjust. This episode originally appeared on March 4, 2019. It was produced by Xine Yao, Paul Kotheimer, and Koritha Mitchell. Post-production by Xine Yao.
View Koritha Mitchell's classroom covenant: www.korithamitchell.com/teaching-and-the-n-word/ [gate.sc]

“Best of” the C19 Podcast | "The N Word in the Classroom: Just Say No"

Certain texts and writers have been allotted attention and resources in the study of American literature, while others remain understudied and sometimes even unknown. The efforts of literary recovery seek to make available lesser-known texts by exploring the archives and doing different kinds of editorial work. How might such recovery efforts materialize in the form of book editions, anthologies, or digital archives? What kinds of editorial decisions do scholars make in the process of curating recovered texts? In this episode of the C19 Podcast, Stephanie Peebles Tavera (Texas A&M University) guides listeners through her first experience of archival and recovery work from encountering manuscripts at the American Jewish Archives during dissertation research to curating a book edition of Annie Nathan Meyer’s Helen Brent, M.D. (1892) to involving her graduate students in contributing to digital archives. Along the way, Tavera interviews colleagues whose ongoing efforts continue to shape the field of American women’s literature, including Dana Herman (Jacob Rader Marcus Center), Lori Harrison-Kahan (Boston College), Brigitte Fielder (University of Wisconsin-Madison), and Mary Chapman (University of British Columbia). These conversations cover a wide range of subjects such as discovering the unexpected; doing archival work in pandemic times;  understanding the “hidden archive”;  and using physical archival materials, print book editions, and digital anthologies in the classroom. Production assistance by DeLisa Hawkes (University of Tennessee-Knoxville). Post production support provided by Rachel Boccio (LaGuardia Community College/CUNY) and Ashley Rattner (Jacksonville State University). Transcript is available at http://bit.ly/3Yayxg4

S06E01 | Doing Recovery in the 21st Century: A Journey Through the Archives and Beyond

In this episode, Susannah Sharpless (Cornell University) and Charline Jao (Cornell University) propose gossip as a scholarly approach and indulge their desire to talk about other people. Our hosts connect juicy tidbits from the lives of nineteenth-century women writers to questions about the role of biography, identification, and inference in scholarship more broadly. Jao explores the life of Rose Terry Cooke, whose short stories about tyrannical husbands and spinster life seem – at first glance – inconsistent with her own belief systems and later marriage. Sharpless takes us through the story of how interpersonal dislikes emerging from deep-seated political disagreements tore apart the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society at one fateful meeting in 1840. Engaging with the delightfully comedic aspects of these stories, the two also insist on deep historicist commitments as they present full pictures of the dynamic, messy nineteenth-century literary sphere, populated by narcissists, social climbers, and debauchées, and as well as dreamers and thinkers with a genuine faith in the power of language to create real change. Post-production support was provided by Julia W. Bernier (Washington & Jefferson College). Transcript available at https://bit.ly/S06E02GossipTranscript

S06E02 | Did You Hear?: Eavesdropping on 19th Century Women

In this episode, Eagan Dean (Rutgers University, New Brunswick) makes the case that trans studies is an important new area for nineteenth century cultural history and that the stakes of this scholarship are higher than ever. Featuring author Peyton Thomas and scholars Rebekkah Mulholland (California State University, Sacramento) and Jen Manion (Amherst College), Eagan Dean gives an overview of current scholarship in the field and opportunities for intervention from C19 scholars, as well as tips for adding trans studies insights to your teaching. This episode also includes a sampling of cutting-edge scholarship in nineteenth century trans studies from the April 2023 Rutgers symposium on The Trans Nineteenth Century. Additional resources are available at https://bit.ly/StudyingTransnessResources and you can find the episode transcript at https://bit.ly/C19Podcast-S07E01-transcript.

Matthew Teutsch's Album

S07E01 | Studying Transness in the Nineteenth Century

Since May 2021, G19: The Graduate Student Collective of C19 has produced and published The New Book Forum, an online interview series that facilitates conversations between graduate students and the author of a recent book in the field of 19th-century American literature. This episode is hosted by the forum’s founders, Rachael DeWitt (Columbia University), Max Chapnick (Northeastern University), and Allison (Ally) Fulton (University of California Davis) who discuss the project’s beginnings and the insights they’ve gleaned since. They share a short selection from an April 2023 interview with Autumn Womack on her book The Matter of Black Living (2022), and then reflect on three years of conversations on new directions in the field, scholarly publication, and bringing the nineteenth century into the classroom. They wrap up by discussing some favorite interview moments and anticipate where the forum is headed in the future. Post-production support by Julia Bernier (Washington & Jefferson College). Full transcript available at https://bit.ly/S07E05Transcript

S07 E05 | The G19 New Book Forum on The Matter of Black Living by  Autumn Womack

Generally associated with postbellum regionalism, mutinous heroines feigning New England propriety, and consumable literature for the urban elites, recent re-readings of Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman’s fiction have uncovered its nuanced, surreptitious, and explosive quality. Much of this disquiet is concentrated in the bodies of barely domesticated animals. Contributors to this episode – Elena Furlanetto (host, University of Duisburg-Essen), Cécile Roudeau (Université Paris Cité), Emma Thiébaut (Université Paris Cité), and Emily Coccia (Carleton College) – propose to take a deeper look at parrots, cats, dogs, squirrels, and monkeys in Understudies (1901), a collection of short stories about New England’s nonhuman nature, and other works by the same author. In Wilkins Freeman’s animals, anthropomorphic and sentimentalist guidelines for animal representation which inform much 19th-century animal fiction burst at the seams to reveal creatures of ambiguity who disturb the quiet of New England living rooms, demonstrate the potential of cages not quite shut, and tread the unstable borders between garden and wilderness. The voices in this podcast follow Stephanie Palmer’s encouragement to “listen to the ambivalences” of Wilkins Freeman’s fiction and treat animals as a productive site of confluence for different foci: from animal studies to queer and feminist ecologies, Indigenous studies, and ambiguity studies among others. Shownotes: https://bit.ly/S08E01_Shownotes Transcript Available at https://bit.ly/S08E01Transcript

S08 E01 | Undomesticated: Nonhuman Animals and Queer Resistance in Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman

“The Time and Place of Performance” looks at the vast circuits of nineteenth-century performance. Amy Huang (Bates College) and Kellen Hoxworth (University at Buffalo, SUNY) consider how nineteenth-century performances move backward and forward, citing past moments, and themselves undergoing processes of recycling and re-presentation to move into the future and challenge the framework of the nation-state. This conversation explores the transoceanic circuits of plays and artists (such as Ira Aldridge and Rose Quong) and the unexpected connections between blackface and yellowface performance to consider how and whether it might be important to teach nineteenth-century theatre and performance. Although Huang and Hoxworth both find some of this theatre “bad,” they discuss how we might teach these plays and performances in ways that do not depend on shoring up these works’ exemplariness or exceptionality. How might we stay with the “bad,” the partial, and the minor moments of theatre and performance history? Full transcript available at https://bit.ly/S08E02Transcript.

S08 E02 | The Time and Place of Performance

In this episode, Fiona Maxwell (University of Chicago) highlights the presence and power of youth voices in the collaborative print culture of Progressive Era Club Newspapers. Through a close look at Northwestern University Settlement House, Fiona illustrates the varied, and often fun, ways in which children and youth from marginalized communities utilized the power of collective imagination to reimagine their public sphere. The episode highlights entertaining archival materials that feature youth voices to demonstrate how collaborative creative projects such as club news inspired working-class young people to use their enhanced facility with print and spoken discourse to become community advocates. Finally, the episode returns to the present and Fiona's work at the Piven Theatre Workshop to discuss the enduring appeal and relevancy of club newspapers to the current generation of young people, who have transformed the genre into a means of fostering resilience and finding belonging in a time of crisis and isolation. Post-production support provided by Jess Van Gilder (Bluegrass Community and Technical College). Full transcript available at https://bit.ly/S08E03Transcript.

S08 E03 | Club Newspapers and Civic Collaboration at Chicago Settlement Houses

In this episode, Jean Pfaelzer (Prof. Emerita, University of Delaware) describes the untold history of slavery, slave revolts, and resistance in California, based on her award-winning book California, A Slave State. Interviewed by Karen Clopton, JD, Chair of the San Francisco Human Rights Commission and Harvard University Advanced Leadership Initiative Fellow, Pfaelzer looks West to upend the notion of slavery in the United States as only a North-South struggle. Pfaelzer establishes that freedom from slavery is a struggle, not a status. Slavery endures even to the present day in the sex trade, field work, sweat shops, and marijuana industry. This is the history of how California’s distinct multi-racial population rose from the struggles and ranks of the unfree. Full transcript available at https://bit.ly/S08E04Transcript.

S08 E04 | California, a Slave State: Birth of a State

In this episode, Marlene L. Daut (Yale University) and Grégory Pierrot (UConn-Stamford) revisit Ridley Scott's big-budget 2023 biopic, Napoleon, out of Apple Studios. The film’s writers promised to tell the story of France’s first emperor, Napoléon Bonaparte, in a novel way. Designed to focus on his relationship with his wife Joséphine de Beauharnais, the film instead harnessed much of its energy on rehearsing Bonaparte’s well-known wins and losses at the Battles of Toulon, Austerlitz, Wagram, the Russian campaign and Waterloo. But there were important battles in Napoléon’s life that viewers did not get to witness—namely, those Bonaparte ordered across the Atlantic in France’s Caribbean colonies in Saint-Domingue (today Haiti) and Guadeloupe.  With this conversation, Daut and Pierrot hope to engage the public in one of the most relevant conversations of our time: how to teach histories of slavery, racism, and colonialism in both national and international contexts. Post-production support by Genevieve Johnson-Smith (Newcastle University). Full transcript available at https://bit.ly/S08E05Transcript.

S08 E05 | Napoleon and the Caribbean

In this episode, Christopher Douglas (Jacksonville State University) leads Ashley Rattner (Jacksonville State University) through some of the most popular late 18th and early 19th-century content available on YouTube: period cooking recreation. If one were to search "18th century America" or "early America" on YouTube, the top results are short videos of people making food in recreation settings. This episode focuses specifically on Townsends, which covers 18th-century America and Early American, which focuses on the early 19th century. The ways these channels recreate the past omits voices that had fewer opportunities to publish during these periods, minimizing or ignoring the ways in which enslaved persons and Indigenous peoples made food, thus creating a limited recreation of America's historical past. The episode ends with suggestions for including more authentic recreation in the general-education classroom. Post-production support by Ryan Charlton (Georgia State University). Works Referenced at bit.ly/S09E01WorksReferenced. Transcript available at bit.ly/S09E01Transcript.

S09 E01 | Just Add Nutmeg: YouTube, Nostalgia, and the Fantasy of Early America

This episode addresses the elephant slouching on its phone in the corner of many literature classrooms. Mary Isbell (University of New Haven) describes her search for a solution to the student reading crisis, incorporating conversations recorded as she was writing Searching for Wonder: Teaching Literature with Student-Selected Texts. These conversations reveal the many reasons faculty may be hesitant to set aside their carefully curated reading lists. With her guests, Isbell explores the history of literature instruction, the firm hold of close reading on the teaching of literature, the role of scholarly expertise in the humanities classroom, and the challenge of assessing process in literature courses. Production support by Stefan Schöberlein (Texas A&M University-Central Texas). Transcript available at bit.ly/S0902Transcript. To read the conclusion of Isbell's book Searching For Wonder, visit bit.ly/S09E02Resources.

S09 E02 | How Do We Teach Literature When Students Won’t Read What We Assign?

In 1888, James Chesser and Georgianna Holly married in the growing city of Fort Smith, Arkansas. A few months later during James's arrest, courts argued that Georgianna was legally a man. Legal and social structures at the time struggled for language to define this mixed-race couple in a time before rampant anti-sodomy and anti-miscegenation laws. In this episode,  Rachel Trusty (Bucknell University) lays out what is known about their lives before and after arrest, and contextualizes their situation in the broader local-national politics of a post-Civil War border town. Full transcript available at https://bit.ly/S09E03ChesserAndHolly. Post-production support by Genevieve Johnson (Newcastle University) and Ryan Charlton (Georgia State University).

S09 E03 | Chesser & Holly: A Collision of Love, Race, and Law in Nineteenth-Century Arkansas

On this episode, Aíne Norris (Old Dominion University), guides us through one story of an age-old accusation levied against women throughout colonial and early American history: witchcraft.

In 1891, newspapers across America printed a story about known witches in the Appalachian Mountains and their supernatural powers. “Sally Friddly” of Potts Creek, Alleghany County, Virginia, was among those named, accused of enchanting a milk pail to steal cream from her neighbors. The blurb and alleged incantation were picked up and re-printed in papers across the country for the next five years, but Fridley’s name was not otherwise associated with witchcraft within public records. Today, the allegation remains, forever naming Fridley, and others, as Virginia witches. Researching their footsteps for over a year led Norris through the mountain roads of Alleghany County and to the doorsteps of descendants, all in a larger discussion of power, lore, and legacy. Production support by Crystal Donkor (Southern Methodist University). Transcript available at bit.ly/S09E04Transcript Resources: bit.ly/S09E04Resources

S09 E04 | Sally Fridley’s Bewildering Press: Investigating Accusations of Appalachian Witchcraft

This episode features a conversation between Alex Alston, Assistant Professor of Literatures in English at Bryn Mawr College, and Maurice O. Wallace, Professor of English at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, revolving primarily around the presence of nonhuman animals in nineteenth-century Antebellum slave narratives and related literature. The discussants explore the evolution of Frederick Douglass’s rhetoric and thinking around nonhuman animal life throughout his career as an editor, activist, and intellectual. They focus on The Heroic Slave, Douglass’s fictional account of a historical revolt aboard the Creole, wherein the fictional protagonist, Madison Washington, is inspired by birds and a snake to escape bondage. From Douglass’s oeuvre Alston and Wallace think out toward how the narratives of other enslaved persons and Black authors of the 19th century contemplated the condition of nonhuman animals alongside their own in a range of asymmetrical and conflicting ways. Other narratives discussed include those of Mary Prince, Moses Roper, Henry Bibb, and Jacob D. Green. The conversation also delves into relevant and recent criticism on questions of race, gender, species, etc. in 19th century texts. Post-production support by Jess Van Gilder (Georgia Tech). Transcript and bibliography available at https://bit.ly/S09E05Transcript

S09 E05 | Animals in 19th-Century African American Literature

“Climate” is the theme and keyword for the Fifth Biennial C19 Conference located at Albuquerque, New Mexico on March 22-25 2018. For our inaugural episode, members of the C19 Podcast team interviewed the organizers of the upcoming conference. Hester Blum (Penn State), Jesse Aleman (UNM), and Carrie Bramen (SUNY Buffalo) share insights about the ideas behind the conference, as well as suggestions for potential conference attendees. The CFP deadline is September 15. Written and produced by Doug Guerra (SUNY Oswego), Melissa Gniadek (UToronto), and Kristie Schlauraff (Villanova).

Season One

S01E01 | Climate: Insights into the Fifth Biennial C19 Conference

J19: The Journal of Nineteenth Century Americanists was launched in 2013. Published twice annually, the official publication of the C19 organization is dedicated to innovative research on, and analysis of, the long nineteenth century. In this episode members of the C19 Podcast team bring you an exclusive interview with the new co-editors of the journal, Elizabeth “Betsy” Duquette (Gettysburg College) and Stacey Margolis (University of Utah). We are excited to bring you this sneak peek into the workings of a leading academic journal and Betsy and Stacey’s vision for the next 5 years of J19. Written and produced by Christine “Xine” Yao (UBC), Mark Sussman (Hunter College), and Matthew Teutsch (Auburn).

S01E02 | Interview with the New Editors of J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists

Can 19th-century approaches to slavery provide a map for thinking about 21st century trafficking? In this episode, Anna Mae Duane (UConn)leads a dialogue about how we can--and can’t--bring the nineteenth century to bear on the current phenomenon largely referred to as “Modern Slavery”--a term that is itself deeply controversial. The conversation centers around the edited collection, Child Slavery Before and After Emancipation: An Argument for Child-Centered Slavery Studies (Cambridge UP, 2017). Editor Anna Mae Duane interviews three contributors to that project, Karen Sánchez-Eppler (Amherst), Micki McElya (UConn) and Sarah Winter (UConn). Together they think about what constitutes a usable past when thinking about modern forms of oppression, and about how focusing on children can help us to rethink questions of property, memory, and freedom.

The episode was produced by Ali Oshinskie with the support of WHUS studios. Post-production assistance by Doug Guerra.

S01E03 | "Modern Slavery"? How 19th Century Slavery Can Speak to 21st Century Trafficking

Today, we associate the theory of evolution with Charles Darwin. But in America in the nineteenth-century, and well into the twentieth, the evolutionary theory of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck were far more influential than Darwin's. In this episode, Kyla Schuller (Rutgers) and Britt Rusert (UMass Amherst) discuss the ways that Lamarckian thought influenced attitudes toward sentimentalism, child development, physiology, and race. Schuller takes up these topics in her book The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century (Duke 2017), and here she expands on them and asks how we adapt our thinking about biopower to the Age of Trump.

Episode produced by Britt Rusert (UMass Amherst). Post-production help from Mark Sussman.

S01E08 | Sex, Power, and Nineteenth-Century Science: a conversation with Kyla Schuller

How does an enslaved woman's song from 1830s in Georgia end up on a 1950s radio program in South Africa and in a modern singing class? This is the surprising story of an African-born woman named Tena, whose music has echoed for generations across continents, airwaves, and even college classrooms. Mary Caton Lingold (Virginia Commonwealth University) first encountered Tena’s song in a book of sheet music by Carl Sandburg but a series of events led her to uncover details about Tena’s life in living memories of her enslavers’ descendants and in archival recordings and documents. This episode is about Tena's life and legacy, the challenges of researching enslaved women’s lives, and how sound and performance can open up new ways of engaging with the past.

This episode was created and produced by Mary Caton Lingold (Virginia Commonwealth University) with post-production help from Kristie Schlauraff.  Episode transcript available here: https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/ca9039_a108805b1f8442d0817c58ca47b7c1ed.pdf

S01E10 | Tena, Too, Sings America: Listening to an Enslaved Woman's Musical Memories of Africa

In our current moment there is an unmistakable need for people who are invested in the knowledge, methods, dispositions, and perspectives cultivated by the humanities. Our trade is nuance: sensitivity to the variability of meaning, a willingness to consider alternative social plots and coexisting answers to complex questions. Yet, in our own professional lives, it can become all too easy to treat the question of what to do with a humanities PhD as though it had only one acceptable answer. In this episode, born out of the recent C19 Conference in Albuquerque, Patricia Crain (NYU) assembles a group of scholars who have found fulfilling careers beyond the tenure track to discuss strategies for translating graduate training to other professional frameworks. Featuring: Jane Greenway Carr (CNN), Sarah Anne Carter (The Chipstone Foundation), Paul Erickson (The American Academy of Arts & Sciences), and David Weimer (The Harvard Map Collection). Episode produced by Douglas Guerra (SUNY Oswego).

S01E11 | Humanities PhDs at Work Beyond the Tenure Track

The N-word is here to stay, and so are debates about it. However, scholars and teachers don’t need the word to disappear so much as they need to be more deliberate and intellectually rigorous in handling it. In this episode, Koritha Mitchell (Ohio State University) suggests that students and faculty members should not be subjected to hate speech in the classroom just because it appears in the texts we study.
 
She shares her deep disappointment with how little white instructors as well as those in other dominant identity categories have thought about their use of slurs in their classes and proposes solutions to improve pedagogical practices. She details her own classroom policies and offers examples of how the policies function in texts by Mark Twain and James Baldwin. We also hear Mitchell's former students discuss how her policy transformed their learning experiences and critical thinking during and beyond her courses. Throughout, Mitchell identifies how intellectually lazy ways of handing racial slurs in the classroom result from, and fuel, that which makes our institutions unjust. Episode produced by Xine Yao, Paul Kotheimer, and Koritha Mitchell. Post-production by Xine Yao.

View Koritha Mitchell's classroom covenant: http://www.korithamitchell.com/teaching-and-the-n-word/

S02E06 | The N-Word in the Classroom: Just Say NO

During the rapid rise of psychiatric institutions in the nineteenth century a doctor’s testimony and the signature of a husband, friend, or community leader was enough to institutionalize a woman.  This episode explores the intake narratives of two patients-turned-advocates, Elizabeth Packard and Lydia Smith, along with intake paperwork from the Dixmont Hospital for the Insane in Pittsburgh in order to probe issues around patient agency, class-based medical treatment, and women’s rights in marriage.  These little-known narratives and archival materials reveal important histories of medicine in the United States. Created by Liana Kathleen Glew. Post-production help from Melissa Gniadek.

Episode transcript available here: https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/ca9039_4efd19e3d22b4e2a9384e29e65955195.pdf

S02E08 | On Intake and Insanity: Women's Narratives of Institutionalization

This episode explores the extraordinary efforts that Elizabeth Melville undertook, after her husband Herman's death, to republish his books and to preserve his records. Examining the way that Elizabeth's efforts were written out of the "Melville Studies" that her labors helped to found, we consider larger philosophical questions about how many lives stand behind the career that One Great Man gets to have. This episode was produced by Adam Fales (UChicago) and Jordan Alexander Stein (Fordham), and it features Rachel Sagner Buurma (Swarthmore), Meredith Farmer (Wake Forest), Laura Heffernan (North Florida), Natasha Hurley (UAlberta), Wyn Kelley (MIT), Laurie Robertson-Lorant (UMass Dartmouth), and Elizabeth Renker (Ohio State). Additional production support by Rachel Boccio (CUNY LaGuardia). Full episode transcript available here: bit.ly/C19PodS03E02.

S03E02 | Wives and Their Authors: Elizabeth and Herman Melville, Literary Labor, and Women’s Work

Mark Twain is an author strongly associated with place, whether it be Hannibal, Missouri, the sleepy hamlet of his childhood; Hartford, Connecticut, the city where he built his lavish mansion; or San Francisco, California, the platform from which he launched his literary career. Yet you might be surprised to learn that Twain wrote *Huckleberry Finn* and many of his most well-known works in Elmira, New York, the peculiar community where his wife, Olivia Langdon, was born. This episode showcases the impact of Elmira’s abolitionist, feminist, socialist, and philanthrocapitalist legacies on Twain’s work, highlighting his interactions with political radicals like Thomas K. Beecher, John W. Jones, and Annis Ford Eastman. This episode was produced by Matt Seybold, resident scholar at the Elmira College Center for Mark Twain Studies. He is joined by the voice of Hal Holbrook—star and subject of the 2019 documentary "Holbrook/Twain: An American Odyssey"—as well as Will Holbrook, and past Quarry Farm Fellows. For more information on Quarry Farm Fellowships, Trouble Begins lectures, or the Center for Mark Twain Studies, please visit http://MarkTwainStudies.org. Music by the Chicago-based Compass Rose Sextet (http://CompassRose6.com) and Steve Webb (http://StivanderAndTheBalance.BandCamp.com). Additional production support by Ashley Rattner (Tusculum University). Full episode transcript available here: http://bit.ly/C19PodS03E03

Season 3

S03E03 | The Gospel of Revolt: Mark Twain in Elmira

This episode considers Indigenous and Settler Colonial Studies and artistic practice across the borders of nation states, and across oceans.  Beginning with a nineteenth-century archival object, the episode turns to a conversation with artist Maria Hupfield (University of Toronto), who reflects on her work as an Indigenous artist and performer who has brought her art to different spaces and geographies.  The episode concludes with a conversation with David Stirrup, the Director of the first Centre for Indigenous and Settler Colonial Studies in the U.K., at the University of Kent.  As nineteenth-century American literary studies increasingly recognizes the transnational dimensions of Indigenous and Settler Colonial Studies, this episode looks beyond national borders for models of global and comparative studies that nevertheless account for particular national and local histories.  This episode was produced by Melissa Gniadek (University of Toronto) and Xine Yao (University College London).  Additional production support was provided by Rachel Boccio (LaGuardia Community College/CUNY), Chelsea Latremouille (University of Toronto), and Stephanie Redekop (University of Toronto). Full episode transcript available here: http://bit.ly/C19PodcastS04E02.

Further Reading:

David Stirrup
https://research.kent.ac.uk/centreforindigenousandsettlercolonialstudies/
https://www.kent.ac.uk/english/people/115/www.kent.ac.uk/english/people/115/stirrup-david

Maria Hupfield
https://mariahupfield.wordpress.com

A show in Montreal based on the work Hupfield did in Venice, mentioned in the episode
https://huguescharbonneau.com/en/maria-hupfield-stay-golden/

Some other exhibits mentioned in the conversation
https://heard.org/exhibit/maria-hupfield/
https://thepowerplant.org/Exhibitions/2017/Winter-2017/Maria-Hupfield--Solo-exhibition.aspx

A recent artist talk with Hupfield
https://veralistcenter.org/events/on-protocol-fellow-maria-hupfield-in-conversation-with-leanne-betasamosake-simpson/

S04E02 | Comparative Settler Colonialisms (I): Transatlantic Movements

The C19 Podcast is a production by scholars from across the world exploring the past, present, and future through an examination of the United States in the long nineteenth century.

The official podcast of C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists.

Popular tracks by C19 Podcast