In the last month or so, your inbox or mailbox has brought you news of April’s issue of the WMQ. This issue centers on the first half of a forum, “Materials and Methods in Native American and Indigenous Studies,” that we are jointly publishing with Early American Literature. The forum’s second half will… Read More
Today’s post comes courtesy of Gabriel Cervantes, author of “Learning from Stephen Burroughs: Republication and the Making of a Literary Book in the Early United States” in the October 2016 issue of the William and Mary Quarterly. by Gabriel Cervantes When I first started working on Stephen Burroughs’s Memoirs, I realized that the narrative uses poetry in clever ways. Read More
In today’s post, WMQ author Miles P. Grier (January 2016) reflects on the editing process at the William and Mary Quarterly and how his background as a literary scholar affected that experience. I ain’t gonna play no second fiddle / Cause I’m used to playing lead —Perry Bradford by Miles P. Grier In a 2008 Forum, published simultaneously in… Read More
In our third entry of our summer conference roundtable roundup, we look back to a workshop on teaching once-forgotten texts with Meredith Neuman. Neuman is Associate Professor of English at Clark University and author of Jeremiah's Scribes: Creating Sermon Literature in Puritan New England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). It may have been the first panel slot on the first day of the conference, but the “Just Teach One” (JTO) workshop was standing room only. Perhaps half of the attendees had “At Least Taught Once,” but many had “Not Taught Any.” The room was full of enthusiasm for the project—now in its third year—that makes available pdf transcriptions of little-known early American texts and asks instructors to set aside just one day in their syllabus to experiment in the classroom. Neither the workshop facilitators (Duncan Faherty, Andy Doolen, and Ed White) nor the handful of “Have Taught Many” participants in the room claimed any special expertise on the use of JTO texts in the classroom. Rather, the entire session was marked by a spirit of open exchange and the desire for collaborative approaches to implementing the project in the classroom. Read More