Manuscript Development Workshop Recipients

Wendy Mallette

Assistant Professor, Religious Studies

Lesbian Feminist Killjoys: Sin, Pessimism, and Queer Histories

Dr. Wendy Mallette’s book project responds to denials of inherited guilt in anti-critical race theory and anti-trans legislation and uncovers what is gained by bringing the doctrine of sin into queer studies. Her archival analysis of 1960s-1980s lesbian feminism centers on Beverly Smith, Andrea Dworkin, Pat Parker, and Jill Johnston, who theorize sex’s imbrication with racism, capitalism, and anti-Semitism. Their pessimism motivates the book’s reappraisal of sin and historical complicity. Engaging contemporary Black and queer Christian thought, “Lesbian Feminist Killjoys” traces how sin and innocence are leveraged to manage fears of racial and sexual contagion from nineteenth-century colonial discourses to debates over same-sex marriage. This project’s queer account of sin provides a means to grapple with sex’s relation to histories of oppression.

Andreana Prichard

Associate Professor, Honors College

Orphans and Demons: What One Missionary’s Conviction Can Tell Us About Centuries of Global Aid to Africa

Prichard’s manuscript, “Orphans and Demons: What One Missionary’s Conviction Can Tell Us About Centuries of Global Aid to Africa,” uses the 2014 federal legal case against a 19-year-oldOklahoma missionary to examine the history and effects of the “orphan industrial complex” in eastern Africa. While these horrific charges made headlines across the globe, questions about the system that allowed an unlicensed orphanage to host unvetted and untrained foreign volunteers, and about mounting evidence of illegal activities at the orphanage—including that the children had been coerced to fabricate these allegations—barely entered the public narrative. Regardless of whether the assaults occurred or whether the allegations were an elaborate hoax carried out by staff running an illicit operation, the “orphan industrial complex” is a central culprit. Indeed, “Orphans and Demons” does not ask who is guilty but asks how this tragic situation—both this individual case and the broader “orphan crisis”—came about. Prichard’s book argues that both are the result of a long history of Western engagement with African “orphans,” and that the case offers an illuminating entry point into the complex colonial genealogies of faith, care, and doing good that dominate the orphanage industry.

Emily Warner

Assistant Professor, School of Visual Arts

Abstraction Unframed: Abstract Murals at Midcentury 

Dr. Warner’s book examines how artists expanded the reach of one of modernism’s most notoriously difficult art forms: abstraction. Across the midcentury years, abstract painters from Albert Swinden to Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner turned to muralism as a way to ‘unframe’ their abstractions: to free them from the spatial confines of the easel painting and the social confines of the elite art world. The resulting artworks—abstract murals embedded in housing projects, living rooms, and office lobbies—rethought the relationship between art and life. They transformed living and working spaces into dynamic, immersive art environments, and declared that abstraction’s true audience lay in the broad masses of people who moved through and lived in the modern world. The book offers a new history of abstraction, revealed to be a deeply social and political form, and engaged in surprising ways with significant American cultural projects, from New Deal populism to the ideology of the midcentury home to the seeming crisis of humanism in postwar corporate culture. Located at the interface between art, architecture, and daily living, abstract murals embody one of modernism’s most enduring fantasies: to bridge the domains of art and life. 

Emily Burns

Associate Professor, Visual Arts

Director, Charles M. Russell Center for the Study of the Art of the American West

Performing Innocence: U.S. Art and Culture in fin-de-siécle Paris

Dr. Emily Burns’ book project “Performing Innocence” traces an intellectual and visual history of pervasive constructions of U.S. innocence —a visual and verbal culture of naïveté—which many expatriate U.S. artists and writers markedly projected in Paris during the late nineteenth century. While thousands of artists went abroad after the Civil War to mature artistically, the majority performed a studied and self-conscious cultural immaturity that pandered to European expectations that the United States lacked history, tradition, and culture. Through analysis of art, visual and material culture, letters, diaries and print materials, Dr. Burns argues that many of the U.S. Americans who traveled to Paris performed a paradox: knowing innocence. Perpetuating this trope in international settings, many Americans traded in nationalist and racialized codes that affirmed dominant narratives of U.S. society as centered in white, Anglo-Saxon identity but that also circulated constant contradictions.   

Lewis Eliot

Assistant Professor, History

Neither Men nor Brothers: Enslaved Rebellion, Abolitionism, and Imperialism in Britain’s Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World

Dr. Lewis Eliot’s book project argues that the pre- and post-emancipation British Empires were in reality fused into continuous imperial white supremacy. Through an examination of the context, progress, and consequences of enslaved revolts in the nineteenth century, this book explains how the nature of slavery in the Atlantic world created a subaltern community and consciousness among those of African descent that whites failed to recognize or understand. Ultimately, Neither Men nor Brothers shows that the justification for enslavements to save Africans from themselves and the validation for emancipation to save Africans from exploitation both served to further British colonial domination. And when judged by territory under the Union Jack, colonialism in the service of abolitionism produced a far larger empire than colonialism in the service of slavery.

Joseph Mansky

Assistant Professor, English

Political Representation: A Literary History, 1558-1651

In this manuscript, Dr. Joseph Mansky charts a new genealogy of political representation from Elizabethan humanism to the English Revolution (1558-1651). He argues that the early history of political representation is in large part a literary history. Centuries before it became a political term of art, representation described instead the kind of virtual or symbolic presence conjured by drama, painting, and poetry. At the heart of the book Dr. Mansky grapples with the central paradox of representation: that it makes present in some form something which is, in fact, absent. By recovering the rhetorical frameworks that shaped representation from poetry to parliament, this book demonstrates how the collision between juridical and rhetorical concepts of representation gave rise to the demand for electoral accountability that remains at the core of modern representative democracy.

Lauren Duval

Assistant Professor of History

The Home Front: Revolutionary Households, Military Occupation, and the Creation of the American Republic

The Home Front analyzes households in and around British-occupied Boston, New York, Newport, Philadelphia, Savannah, and Charleston during the American Revolution to investigate how diverse civilian populations experienced military occupation and understood its implications for their lives, families, and property, and the legacies of this turmoil for the nascent American republic.

Victoria Sturtevant

Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies

Fertile Ground: A Critical History of Pregnancy in American Film and Television Comedy

Fertile Ground traces the history of pregnancy in American film and television comedy, linking the social evolution of American attitudes toward pregnancy with mainstream representational strategies that transformed social discomforts into comedy.