Lives, Writings and Legacies of Phillis Wheatley Peters

This volume focuses on the legacy and relevance of poet Phillis Wheatley Peters in biography, literary criticism and public humanities scholarship. Contributors draw from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century manuscripts, editions and broadsides, and twentieth- and twenty-first century memorials, literary works and print and online exhibits, as well as community programming. Major themes are community and collaboration, Wheatley’s transatlantic travels and alliances, her contributions to global Black print culture and how her memory and art have animated individual and collective expressions of sisterhood, African Diasporic culture and joy. Contributors address omissions, silences and gaps in her life and poetry through plausible, authentic re-imaginings of her marriage, childhood, interactions with white patrons and affiliations with African American and Afro-British abolitionists and friends.

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.