Mollie Barnes, PhD

My name is Mollie Barnes, and I’m an Associate Professor of English at USCB. My specialty is nineteenth-century U.S. literature—a field that invites us to trace dynamic changes in our world, locally and globally, at the same time.

Most falls, I teach Composition and Rhetoric, Introduction to English Studies, and an upper-division literature seminar. Most springs, I teach Composition and Literature, Survey of American Literatures, and an upper-division literature seminar. My expertise in nineteenth-century women writers shapes my seminars in African-American Literature; American Literature, 1830–1860; American Literature, 1860–1910; American Novel to 1914; Historical Literature; and Transatlantic Literature.

I’ve published nearly a dozen articles and book chapters on Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Margaret Fuller, Charlotte Forten Grimké, Fanny Kemble, Emma Lazarus, and Edith Wharton. My first book—Paper Heroines: How Women Reformers Wrote One Another’s Lives in the Sea Islands, 1838–1902 (forthcoming, USC Press 2025)—studies activist women’s journals/diaries and biographies, and it examines how Black and white women activists wrote one another in and out of local literary histories. Paper Heroines was supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. My second book is a critical edition of Laura Matilda Towne’s 1862–1864 diaries—those documenting her first years as founding teacher of Penn School.

I serve as First Vice President of the Margaret Fuller Society. Fuller is the heart of my teaching and scholarship; her weekly conversazione drew people to her work and into her circle, and with well-known intensity that matches the respect she now garners as an author and editor, an activist and feminist. I count Fuller’s love of conversation as just one of many literary pearls reminding me how fortunate I am to think and talk about ideas with good people each day.