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Author Biography

Sam Plasencia is an Assistant Professor at Colby College, where she teaches and researches early Black intellectual histories.

Abstract

This article describes a senior seminar I designed titled 'Phillis Wheatley Peters and Her Literary Afterlives,' which sought to (re)introduce Wheatley Peters to mostly white students as a literary foremother, and to do so by way of Black feminist writing that considers method. While nearly all of my students had encountered Wheatley Peters before my class, none had been asked to consider the methods by which we read her, and what different ones will allow and negate, make visible or foreclose. I thus organized this class around the methods that have emerged in the last twenty years, in order to call for and instantiate a revolution (a “a great change”) in my student’s thinking about Phillis Wheatley Peters. The course is comprised of seven units, each of which foreground a particular method by which to read her. Together they form a series of revolutions wherein each (re)turn allows light to shine on a different facet of Wheatley Peters’s life and writings. This article describes the conceptual trajectory of the class and how I bolstered its content with critical and creative assignments.

Keywords

Phillis Wheatley, Phillis Wheatley Peters, methodology, pedagogy, archives, eighteenth century

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