Network Publications
Transatlantic Women at Work: Service in the Long Nineteenth Century (New American Studies Journal, Vol 74, 2023)
The centerpiece of this issue is a set of exchanges on the topic of women’s service in the 19th century. Inkeeping with this journal’s aim to provide a forum for dialogue, the Intercontinental Cross-Currents Network is pleased to share a collection of essays and responses reflecting long-distance academic conversations that took place during the pandemic. The service provided by many women during the pandemic inspired the theme.
As Julia Nitz, Esther Wetzel, Sandra H. Petrulionis, Laura-Isabella Heitz, and Khristeena Lute point out in the detailed account that follows, service was originally bound up with religious devotion. From pious beginnings, it evolved into a custom for securing women’s unremunerated labor in the household and status outside it. Though service is cognate with servant and servitude, it could be liberating for certain volunteers. White women who had the time and resources to devote themselves to civic and moral causes, did so in part because altruism was a mark of distinction, offering opportunities to act in a public sphere otherwise dominated by men. Nitz et al. also point out that what counted as a virtue for some was a compulsion for others. Poorer women, and women of color, had no time for public service if they were busy serving other masters. The contributions show that service was required of women in the nineteenth century, but what it entailed varied widely according to class, ethnicity, and location. This special issue is meant to open a new field of research that must be expanded to include a diverse range of women’s experiences.
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The Politics of Gender in Early American Theater: Revolutionary Dramatists and Theatrical Practices (Transcript, 2022)
edited by Leopold Lippert and Ralph J. Poole
In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the American theater emerged as a crucial cultural space for debates around gender stereotypes, gendered conduct, sexual desire, the politics of intimacy and domesticity, female authorship, as well as the complex intersections of gender and other markers of cultural difference, such as race, ethnicity, socioeconomic class, age, or nation. This collection explores the role of gender in the formation of American theatrical culture in this period. It features essays on well-known early American dramatists such as Susanna Rowson or Judith Sargent Murray, but also sheds light on anonymous authors and more obscure theatrical practices.
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Connecting Women: National and International Networks during the Long Nineteenth Century (Smithsonian Scholarly Press, 2021)
edited by Barton C. Hacker, Joanne Paisana, Margaret Esteves Pereira, Jaime Costa, Margaret Vining
Women’s networks proliferated during the long nineteenth century in the Atlantic World and began spreading globally. Connecting Women features presentations from the second conference of the Intercontinental Cross-Currents Network, “The Dynamics of Power: Inclusion and Exclusion in Women’s Networks during the Long Nineteenth Century,” held in 2016 at the University of Minho in Braga, Portugal. Intercontinental Cross-Currents provides a cooperative platform for researchers from all scholarly disciplines interested in the literal and metaphorical networks created and navigated by women from the European and American continents from 1776 to 1939—the so-called long nineteenth century. Organized by the University’s Institute of Arts and Humanities’ Centre for Humanistic Studies and the Department of English and North American Studies, the conference brought together international participants who investigated mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion within women’s networks forged in Britain, France, Italy, the Philippines, Portugal, and the United States. Connecting Women delves into both literary networks and those with social and political agendas that centered around temperance associations, anti-slavery societies, crime syndicates, suffragism, political organizations, and war relief.
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Intercontinental Crosscurrents:
Women’s Networks across Europe and the Americas (Winter, 2016)
edited by Julia Nitz, Sandra H. Petrulionis, Theresa Schön
First presented at the conference ‘Intercontinental Cross-Currents: Women’s (Net-)Works across Europe and the Americas (1789–1939)’ in Wittenberg, Germany, in December 2013, the papers assembled in this volume trace nineteenth-century women’s networks inside and outside historical movements and literary texts, in diverse genres, at various historical moments, and from different vantage points.
Considered together, the contributions attest to the potential of a woman-centered approach to transatlantic historiographical, cultural, and literary studies. Very much like the people, texts, and objects they examine, they are transatlantic in scope and perspective. Truly inspired by the idea and concept of the Atlantic Crosscurrents, these essays confirm and emphasize interdisciplinarity and methodological variety in (trans-)Atlantic studies. See more