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Dr. Tara Bynum is an Assistant Professor of English & African American Studies and a scholar of early African American literary histories before 1800. She received her PhD in English from Johns Hopkins University and a BA in Political Science from Barnard College.
Her current monograph, Reading Pleasures (University of Illinois Press’ New Black Studies, fall 2022), examines the ways in which eighteenth-century enslaved and/or free men and women feel good or experience pleasure in spite of the privations of slavery, “unfreedom,” or white supremacy. It is a pleasure that isn’t beholden to social expectations or systemic oppression, but instead is experienced because of an individual’s commitment to religious faith, friendship, or community building. This work is part of a larger, ongoing project that thinks more deeply about how black communities in the early republic made and shaped the very meaning of nation-building in the greater New England area and beyond. Related essays have appeared or are forthcoming in: Early American Literature, Common-Place, Legacy, J19, Criticism, American Periodicals, and African American Literature in Transition, Vol. 1, 1750-1800.
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Dr. Brigitte Nicole Fielder is an Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she teaches courses in African American literature, gender, race, childhood studies, and children's literature. She is the author of Relative Races: Genealogies of Interracial Kinship in Nineteenth-Century America (Duke UP, 2020), coeditor of Against a Sharp White Background: Infrastructures of African American Print (University of Wisconsin Press, 2019), coeditor of J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, and a founder of a Black digital humanities project working to recover Alice Dunbar-Nelson's stories about childhood for readers of all ages. Her current research includes a book on racialized human-animal relationships in the long nineteenth century, which shows how childhood becomes a key site for both humanization and racialization, and a new project on "old tech" and early iterations of Afrofuturist futuring.
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