Dear Insurrect! supporters,
Happy late summer! We hope everyone is staying cool and finding time to ignore your emails. Here are some new updates from us:
ICYMI: last month, we published “‘To live without work’: How Two Deaf Brothers Reimagined Their Lives in Eighteenth-Century Connecticut” by Wulfstan Scouller, which explores a case study of disability, conservatorship, and labor in eighteenth-century Connecticut
Congrats! to Insurrect! author Emily Gowen on receiving the SHEAR dissertation prize for her dissertation, “On the Margins: Steady-Sellers and the Problem of Inequality in Nineteenth-Century America.” You can read Emily’s article on reproductive politics and paratextual analysis from last fall in our archives.
Shout-out to all of the historical and cultural organizations that made public statements in June against the fascist transphobic gathering at the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia, including the McNeil Center for early American studies, the OAH, AHA, and SHEAR! Also, check out Jen Manion’s response article in the Philadelphia Inquirer on how LGBTQ people lived in early America. Solidarity to the workers at the museum, and to all the protestors who showed up to make it clear that book-banning fascists are not welcome in Philadelphia.
This has been a summer full of lots of writing and editing at Insurrect! Behind the scenes, we have been working with quite a few authors, whose work we are excited to share in the coming months. Most importantly…
Meet Alejandra and Thai-Catherine!!
We are excited to introduce two graduate student writers who we have been fortunate enough to work with this summer. Both Alejandra and Thai-Catherine submitted excellent applications to write for us throughout the summer months, and we are very excited to be able to fund their writing. Thanks especially to our generous donors and patrons for enabling this collaboration!
Alejandra Marquez (she/her) is an English Ph.D. student at the University of California, Riverside, who is interested in research regarding Romance, Pre-modern literature, Postcolonial/Decolonial studies, Latinx literature, and Archive studies. Her research aims to explore the way Romance as a genre has evolved over time and how that evolution was influenced by colonial trends and ideologies, more specifically the way that contemporary BIPOC/POC Romance writers are reclaiming the genre and creating reparative narratives to reimagine Romance tropes. She has also done conference presentations on the intersectionality of first-generation students in higher education spaces, bringing awareness to the specific needs of this underrepresented population, speaking from her own experience as a first-generation student of color. While completing her M.A. in English Composition with a concentration in Literature from California State University, San Bernardino, Alejandra was also a Sally Casanova Pre-Doctoral Scholar and literature instructor. With a passion for Writing Center Studies, Alejandra has spent a large portion of her higher education career working with students as a tutor and, more recently, as a composition instructor. Alejandra aims to provide students with the resources and skills necessary to support their specific needs. Alejandra is excited to join this year’s cohort of Insurrect! Writing Fellows and believes in Insurrect!’s mission to produce works by writers who challenge and critique frameworks through its accessible platform.
Thai-Catherine Matthews (pronouns: she/her) studied for her MPhil in Medieval Literature at the University of Cambridge as a Gates-Cambridge scholar and is currently a candidate for the PhD at Johns Hopkins University where she has also taught as an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Teaching Fellow with the Humanities Collaboratory. A graduate of Wellesley College, Thai-Catherine is a former Mellon-Mays Fellow who is researching the intersections between Western medieval literature and contemporary race politics. In addition to researching the medieval, Thai-Catherine has lobbied to resist police brutality through work with Change.Org, published on race and film in Black Camera, contributed to the Modern Language Association’s upcoming collection on teaching pedagogy Teaching Food in Literature, and is currently revising an excerpt of her dissertation for publication in the forthcoming 2024 special issue of Speculum entitled “Race, Race-Thinking, and Identity in the Global Middle Ages." She's absolutely thrilled to be joining this year’s cohort of Insurrect! Writing Fellows, as her passion for academia is fueled by a belief that research should be as useful in the world as it is prioritized in the classroom—and so this opportunity to join the Insurrect! mission as a public-facing writer is one she’s so honored to have!
We will be publishing Alejandra and Thai-Catherine’s work soon, so follow us here and on twitter (RIP) for updates on their fabulous work!
In the meantime, you can subscribe (if you haven’t already) to our Substack below, follow us on our lingering twitter, support us via Patreon or PayPal, and/or bookmark our website.
As always, we are thankful for your support and look forward to sharing more with you soon!
Cheers,
The Insurrect! Editorial Team