Dr. Mollie Barnes Wins National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend
USCB English Professor Dr. Mollie Barnes is having a productive summer. She specializes in nineteenth-century U.S. literature and won a summer stipend grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for the research and writing of her book Paper Heroines: How Women Reformers Wrote One Another's Lives in the Sea Islands, 1838-1902. The focus of her book is on how women reformers in the Sea Islands of South Carolina historicized their peers in journals, diaries, biographies, and other forms of life writing.
The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is an independent federal agency founded in 1965. One of the largest funders of humanities programs in the U.S., the NEH promotes excellence in the humanities. NEH grants typically go to institutions such as museums, archives, libraries, universities, and also to individual scholars.
“Paper Heroines studies how women reformers in the Sea Islands historicized their peers in various forms of life writing: letters, journals, diaries, and biographies,” said Dr. Barnes. “I study the ways race and gender intersect in these women’s relationships and textual representations of one another, and I argue that white women reformers’ (mostly) do-good meddling, mediating, and writing on behalf of enslaved or newly liberated Black women in fact silenced or compromised them at times. And then I demonstrate how Black women reclaim and transform life writing on their own terms.”
The NEH Summer Stipend provides support for Dr. Barnes to complete the second chapter of her book. This chapter is entitled “Writing Penn School and One Another: Laura Towne, Charlotte Forten, and their Archival Afterlives.” The chapter looks at two journals composed in the same room of the same house (the Oaks Plantation on St. Helena Island, S.C.)—one by Laura Towne, a white teacher and one by Charlotte Forten, the first Black teacher at the Penn School—at the very same time.
"While many histories of the Port Royal Experiment and the Penn Center treat Forten and Towne as contemporaries," Barnes explains, "no scholar has read their diaries together—or analyzed the literary qualities of both that can help us understand the racialized language both use in their life writing." Dr. Barnes is studying how these women treat one another as peer educators, "how they represent one another by writing (or not writing) directly and explicitly about their racial identities, and how their sometimes uncomfortable representations of Gullah communities differ from one another."
“Part of my research this summer will involve studying the manuscripts of the diaries in special collections archives. Towne's diaries are especially tricky,” Dr. Barnes said, “The editor of the only version that's in print actually deleted some of her most important entries while transcribing the manuscript and preparing it for publication. I'll actually need to look at the diary pages to find how Towne wrote Forten—and then to tell that story in my book.”
Dr. Barnes’ book is under advance contract with University of South Carolina Press, forthcoming spring 2025.