Disruptive Narratives: Harriet E. Wilson and the Politics of Place, Race and Religion. Wilson’s life and writing trouble received paradigms about genre, abolition, cross-racial alliances, medicine, gendered religious performance, sponsorship and economic success. I begin by taking up the generic and regional disruptions Our Nig offers and by situating the book in relation to Northern narratives of enslavement, bondage and captivity. Disruptive Narratives then presents new research about the popularity of “Mrs. H.E. Wilson’s” hair dressing and regenerator and goes on to explore the scope and reach of her postbellum success as a New England lecturer known as “Boston’s earnest and eloquent colored medium.” This projects seeks to answer the question: What do we learn about narratives of labor, race and resistance when our findings rub against the grain of conventional nineteenth-century notions about Black national, regional and religious identity? Preliminary research has been published in the Boston Globe, the Penguin Classics edition of Our Nig and in the anthology Harriet Wilson’s New England.

Resist! Transnational Rebellion in Black Novels and Newspapers. Since their inception, Black papers have explored the tension between U.S. and Diasporic-centered articulations of “national” identity. Appearing in the pages of Freedom’s Journal, Frederick Douglass’s Paper, the Christian Recorder, McGirt's Magazine and the Pittsburgh Courier, serialized fiction takes up issues of resistance in a global context. Instead of reading these republished texts as discrete works of fiction, this project situates its analysis in relation to—and recovers—the often explicit historical references that its original reception communities or audiences would have recognized and pays attention to the newspaper and reading culture of the papers themselves.