early spring 2024 greetings from Insurrect!
announcing an internship opportunity and other news, updates, & thoughts
Dear Insurrect! Readers and Supporters,
Happy early spring & late winter!
After a long 2023, the Insurrect! team is excited about the possibilities that 2024 holds. We are especially dedicated to building bridges and community among scholars off the tenure-track and expanding the breadth of our published work.
To that end, we are so thrilled to announce that we are offering a funded C. Dallett Hemphill undergraduate internship in partnership with the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania for summer 2024. The intern will research and write four pieces for Insurrect!, assist with style and copy editing, and create content for our social media accounts. Please share the info linked above with undergraduate students enrolled at McNeil Center Consortium member institutions. We are especially excited to work with students who are self-motivated around researching early American historical topics, who are passionate about Insurrect!’s mission, and who are looking for experience with editorial work and public-facing writing. The application is due by April 19th 2024.
Thank you so much to the McNeil Center for supporting this internship among other stellar opportunities for undergraduate researchers!
In other outreach news, we now have social media presence on both Instagram and BlueSky. We are hoping for a wider range of scholars and thinkers to become involved with our work. Be sure to follow us to get up-to-date coverage of our publications and opportunities to write for Insurrect!. We have mainly navigated away from Twitter (RIP).
New Publications:
Over the past few months we’ve published some exciting work. Here is some of what you may have missed:
Mutual Aid in Early America: A Roundtable. Organized by Ittai Orr, this roundtable features pieces from Eagan Dean, Britt Rusert, and Kimberly Takahata. This roundtable is an extension of a conversation that took place at the “Mutual Aid in Early America” panel at the Society of Early Americanists (SEA) Biannual Meeting in June 2023, chaired by Liz Polcha.
Alejandra Márquez published “Injustice and Romance: Critical Reflection on Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona” calling for readers to rethink how we read and critique Helen Hunt’s novel, asking us to better understand how it was used and uptaken as a tool of colonial settlerism. Márquez was a Summer Fellow with Insurrect!.
Thai-Catherine Matthews published “Taking One’s Place: Affirmative Action and the Legacy of Academia’s Black Expats,” an impassioned reflection on the roots of Affirmative Action in the wake of it being overturned in June 2023. Matthews was a Summer Fellow with Insurrect!.
Over the summer, we published two articles on Disability in Early America: Vivian Delchamps penned “Early American Disability Studies: Teaching (and Confronting) Internalized Ableism” which expands on how teachers and students can combat internalized ableism and thoughtfully and carefully discuss ableism and disability in early American text, and Wulfstan Scouler wrote “‘To Live Without Work’: How Two Deaf Brothers Reimagined their Lives in EIghteenth-Century Connecticut” on small acts of disabled defiance in the face of the Protestant work ethic in Early-Republic New England.
If you are interested in publishing with us, please visit our submissions page or reach out to our editorial team at insurrect.history@gmail.com.
What we’re reading now:
Alanna Prince: I finally had the chance to read Christina Sharpe’s Ordinary Notes. A beautiful meditation on life, memory, and race.
Elise A. Mitchell: I am finally reading Beatriz Nascimento’s The Dialectic Is in the Sea a volume of Nascimento’s Black Brazilian radical feminist writings that has recently been made available in English.
Ittai Orr: This fall I read Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger and found the chapters on autism and Jewish history particularly powerful, especially given my own research on the relationship between race and intellectual ableism.
Lila O’Leary Chambers: Over the holiday break, I happened to read Douglas Stuart’s novel Young Mungo alongside Jennifer Nesbitt’s work of literary criticism, Rum Histories, both of which, in their own ways, follow how alcohol is woven into the (post)colonial present.
Liz Polcha: I just read Jjjjjerome Ellis’ recently published book of poetry Aster of Ceremonies with my Eco-Feminist Literature class, which draws inspiration from M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong. This work is especially of interest to early Americanists because of how Ellis remixes and rewrites self-emancipated slave advertisements through a lens of ecology.
Beyond the Pages of Insurrect!:
In January 2024, Liz Polcha and Ittai Orr gave a presentation about Insurrect! at the Modern Language Association Conference in Philadelphia on a panel called “Facing the Past, Facing the Public,” as part of a series of panels organized by the Early Americanist forum. Their presentation focused on how we aim to serve a community of junior scholars and readers outside of academia, and how we draw inspiration from Philadelphia’s history of mutual aid organizing.
Ittai Orr’s article “The Mismeasure of Manabozho: Unsettling the Science of the Mind in Henry R. Schoolcraft’s Algic Researches” was published in June 2023 in American Literary History
Lila Chambers’ article “Alcohol Diplomacy, Gender and Power in the Late Seventeenth-Century Gold Coast Slaving Complex” was published in Past & Present in January 2024
Kimberly Takahata’s article “Reading with Powhatan Ancestral Remains in Robert Beverley's The History and Present State of Virginia” was published in Early American Literature in February 2024.
Elise Mitchell’s open access article “Across the Atlantic: morbidity, geography, and the eighteenth-century French Atlantic slave trade” was published in February 2024 in Atlantic Studies.
Janine Yorimoto Boldt was interviewed by a PBS show “The Look Back” on an episode titled “Not Set in Stone” about her curatorial work at the Chazen Art Museum on slavery, emancipation, and sculpture.
In grief and in solidarity:
Like many of you, we are horrified by the ongoing genocide in Palestine and concerned about rising hatred and threats to our Jewish and Muslim families, friends, students, and colleagues closer to home. Since October 7th, we have been deeply grieving and like many of our readers, we have found it difficult to think about much else. We extend our sincere sympathy to readers whose loved ones have been affected by the violence of the last several months, and join the global chorus of voices demanding a just peace. We invite you to explore and participate in efforts within and outside the academy to curtail the rising death toll of approximately 30,365 Palestinians and 1,139 Israelis by stopping the US-supported assault on Gaza’s civilians and Israel’s blockade on emergency aid, and opposing the past and ongoing settler displacement of Palestinians.
We also would like to shout-out publications like Hammer & Hope and The Funambulist who have made action-oriented statements in solidarity with Palestinians and against settler colonialism; these two publications are good models of how scholars, writers, and activists can think and bear witness together in times of unbearable violence and brutality.
Honoring Nex Benedict:
We are mourning Nex Benedict, a 2TSGNC teenager who died following a violent attack from their classmates in the bathroom of Owasso High School, which is located on the Cherokee Nation Reservation. In memory of Nex, their grandmother and guardian Sue Benedict (Chahta/Choctaw) said, “I was so proud of Nex. They were going some place, they were so free…Nex had a light in them that was so big, they had so many dreams. I want their light to keep shining for everyone. That light was so big and bright and beautiful, and I want everyone to remember Nex that way.” They loved Minecraft and their cat Zeus. At Insurrect! we want to remember Nex this way, and hold space for everyone grieving Nex within ongoing settler colonial and transphobic violence.
With love and gratitude,
The Insurrect! Editorial Team
Ways to support Insurrect!
Write With Us: insurrecthistory.com/submit
Assign Insurrect! articles in your classes: insurrecthistory.com/archives
Follow us on instagram or bluesky: @insurrecthistory @insurrecthistory.bsky.social
Follow our substack newsletter: insurrect.substack.com
Become a monthly contributor via Patreon: patreon.com/insurrecthistory