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“The Genius of Phillis Wheatley Peters” embodies both an honoring of the poet and her legacies and an opportunity to spotlight the learning power and the significance of literature in our lives. Through a partnership of the University of Georgia and TCU, this project also celebrates the efficacy of collaborative learning informed by a participatory vision of the humanities and the arts. Our codirectors, contributing team members, and many sponsoring groups and organizations have come together in shared learning throughout the 2023 anniversary year of Wheatley Peters’s Poems–and beyond.

Visit Our Sister Project: “The Genius of Phillis Wheatley Peters”

Entry by Sanjana Chowdhury

Football has been whitewashed as an English game created by white Britons in the 19th century. But one of the major influences on football as we know it was Andrew Watson, a Black footballer who played for Scotland in the 1880s. Watson was born in Georgetown, Demerara, in British Guiana in 1856. His mother, Anna Rose, was a freed Black woman, and his father was a white Scottish solicitor and sugar planter. His family was also related to John Gladstone (father of William Gladstone), one of the largest British slave owners. Mark Al Nasir, Liverpudlian poet and a descendant of Watson, says: “This is a guy who lived the life of privilege. He had a Prime Minister for a cousin and his family owned a bank.” Descended from both enslaved and enslavers, Andrew Watson became the most important figure in 19th-century Scottish football when he moved to Glasgow in 1875.

Watson studied at Glasgow University, and played for the leading Glasgow club, Parkgrove FC. Later, he went on to play for Queen’s Park. He was the captain of the Scottish team that defeated England 6-1 at The Oval in March 1881. He again led his team to victory in the next two matches – 5-1 against Wales in Wrexham, and 5-1 against England at Glasgow. Watson was the pioneer of the Scottish “passing and running” game that was superior to and eventually replaced the English “individual dribbling” game. He was also the club secretary, an administrator, and a financial investor of Queen’s Park, as well as the player who won three Scottish Cups, in 1881, 1882, and 1886. After he retired from football, he became a maritime engineer. Richard McBrearty, curator at the Scottish Football Museum, states that Watson was “a champion of football, not just for his playing prowess but as a black man playing what was basically a white game at that time.” Llew Walker’s 2021 book A Straggling Life explores the life of Andrew Watson, the world’s first Black international footballer.

Sources

https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/58841184
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-57520338

Although often dubbed “domestic” novelists, nineteenth-century women writers often featured girl protagonists who travelled, and much of the time this travel wasn’t relegated to a local or even national scale.  Rather, like Amy in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, fictional girls on both sides of the Atlantic often journeyed abroad, usually with the intent of learning more about themselves, their relationships with others, and even their country.  This collection will interrogate both literal and metaphorical exchanges of culture that happened in nineteenth-century girls’ fiction.  Creative approaches to thinking about transatlantic travel and how it had an impact on girl culture in both Europe and America are invited.  For instance, contributors could explore novels like Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty, Maria Susanna Cummins’s The Lamplighter, and E.D.E.N. Southworth’s The Hidden Hand, all of which earned popularity in both Europe and America.  Likewise, the editors are eager to read submissions centering on girls’ magazines, journals, and etiquette books, so long as these were read in both Europe and America.

The book will comprise three sections: girl characters travelling, books travelling, and girl readers travelling. The first section will focus on how young female characters in novels approach and respond to travelling abroad, the second will consider how books were received and responded to on both sides of the Atlantic by the masses and critics alike, and the third section will examine how the books inspired their young readers to travel themselves and critically examine their cultural mores.

Interested contributors should send abstracts of 500 words (as an attachment in Word) and brief CV to Robin Cadwallader and LuElla D’Amico at transatlanticgirlhood@gmail.com. Abstracts are due by June 30, 2018, and authors will be notified of acceptance quickly after the deadline for submissions. Note that acceptance of the abstract does not guarantee acceptance of the article. First full drafts will be due January 15, 2019.

The North American Victorian Studies Association is currently accepting proposals for the NAVSA 2018 conference to be held in St. Petersburg, FL Oct. 11-14, 2018.

From the NAVSA Website:

“The call for papers for NAVSA 2018 in St. Petersburg, Florida is now available on the conference website (http://navsa2018.english.ufl.edu). The deadline to submit proposals and panels is March 4, 2018. On the website, you will also find detailed information about St. Pete, the conference hotel, local activities, and conference updates.

The conference theme, “Looking Outward,” asks: What did the Victorians see, feel, and think as they looked beyond the borders of their time and place? We welcome broad interpretations of this theme. Our three plenaries: Erika Rappaport, Belinda Edmondson, and Sally Shuttleworth anchor three foci of the conference, and we hope there will be lively conversations on Caribbean Studies, Global Victorians, and Science/Medicine, even as the conference overall ranges more widely.

The conference will be held at the Hilton St. Petersburg Bayfront Hotel. The hotel is located in downtown St. Pete’s waterfront district and is only a short drive or bus ride to the beaches of the Gulf of Mexico. The St. Pete waterfront district features several museums, restaurants, and cultural attractions.

Questions can be directed to Sarah Kniesler, conference graduate student assistant: navsa2018@gmail.com

Finally, a reminder that all delegates must be NAVSA members, in addition to paying conference registration costs, at the time of the St. Pete conference. Please join or renew your NAVSA membership if necessary. “

Dear colleagues in transatlantic teaching,

We are excited to share the news that Edinburgh University Press will be continuing to support growth in this exciting field of scholarship and pedagogy with publication of an anthology of primary texts.

A five-person editorial team has recently signed a contract to prepare Transatlantic Anglophone Literatures, 1776-1920. Andrew Taylor of Edinburgh University, along with Linda K. Hughes and Sarah R. Robbins of TCU, with associate editors Heidi Hakimi-Hood (a current TCU Ph.D. student) and Adam Nemmers (Lamar University) are already at work, with much-appreciated guidance from a talented advisory board of scholars.

Heidi and Adam were both enrolled in the 2013 seminar offering of  Linda and Sarah  (see our 2013 syllabus here). Students in the 2017 seminar—including our new web manager Sofia Prado Huggins—have given very helpful input to our planning for the project, which has also benefited from having Andrew Taylor visit with us at TCU in spring 2017, thanks to funding from two TCU internal grants.

In addition to familiar literary texts from the Caribbean, Canada, Great Britain, and the US, less well-known genres, authors, and media will be represented, including periodical and newspaper articles, letters, and illustrations.  In all cases, selections will feature not only a transatlantic topic but also an intersection across national borders.

We’ll keep you updated on our progress in the months ahead. We are all well aware that the preparation of anthologies is ambitious and time-consuming work, but we feel fortunate in having an active network of colleagues to offer encouragement, along with our board members. We anticipate a 2020 publication date.

Meanwhile, do visit this web space for updates and, via expanded sections of the website, digital, ready-for-teaching texts that will supplement those to be included in the eventual print anthology.

Advisory Board Members:

Jocelyn Almeida-Beveridge, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Susan Castillo Street, King’s College, London
Clare Elliott, Northumbria University
Christopher Gair, University of Glasgow
Barbara McCaskill, University of Georgia
Ifeoma Nwankwo, Vanderbilt University
Clare Pettitt, King’s College, London
Jessie Reeder, Binghampton University
Joseph Rezek, Boston University
Fiona Robertson, St. Mary’s University, Twickenham
Marjorie Stone, Dalhousie University
Coll Thrush, University of British Columbia
Tom Wright, University of Sussex

The Faculty Forum Series at Midwestern State University presents Associate Professor of Spanish Dr. Claudia Montoya at 7 p.m. Feb. 17, 2016, in Dillard 101. Montoya’s topic will be “Two Brave Women’s Tales During the Mexican Revolution, Edith O’Shaughnessy and Rosa E. King.”

Montoya says that the history of the Mexican Revolution (1910-1917) has been as diverse and abundant as the voices that were willing to narrate it, either through historical or fictional texts. The history and fiction were often mistaken for one another.

One group whose voice was marginalized in the history was that of the foreign nationals – particularly the Americans and the British – who had somehow managed to send word to their country of what had been happening in Mexico during that time.

Montoya will present a comparative analysis of the journey of two female travelers during the time of the Mexican Revolution. American Edith O’Shaughnessy (1870-1939) traveled with her husband, the diplomat Nelson O’Shaughnessy. Rosa E. King (1867-1955), a British citizen, became a widow right before the Revolution, and had to find the means to sustain herself and her two children during those difficult times.

The Faculty Forum is an interdisciplinary lecture series presented by MSU to provide faculty the opportunity to have their scholarship recognized in the community and to promote the exchange of ideas among colleagues. Committee members are Drs. Catherine Stringfellow, Suhua Huang, and Jonathan Price.