NEH Summer Institute

Deborah Mutnick

Deborah Mutnick is a professor of English at Long Island University’s Brooklyn campus. She is author of Writing in an Alien World: Basic Writing and the Struggle for Equality in Higher Education (Boyton/Cook 1996). Her work has appeared in journals, including College English, College Composition and Communication, Rhetoric Review, and Community Literacy Journal, as well as several edited volumes. Publications on the Federal Writers’ Project and the literary left include “Toward a Twenty-First Century Federal Writers’ Project” (College English 77.1, 2014) and “Write. Persist. Struggle”: Sponsors of Writing and Workers’ Education in the 1930” (Community Literacy Journal 11.1, 2016). She is currently working on a monograph, Richard Wright’s America: Yearning for What Never Was, and an edited volume on urban sustainability.

Jerrold Hirsch

Jerrold Hirsch, Professor Emeritus of History at Truman State University, Kirksville, Missouri, is co-editor with Tom Terrill of Such as Us: Southern Voices of the Thirties (1978), a collection of previously unpublished FWP southern life histories, author of Portrait of America:  A Cultural History of the Federal Writers’ Project (2003), and co-editor with Larry Rogers, of America’s Folklorist:  B. A. Botkin and American Culture (2010).  He has published numerous articles on the FWP, the history of American folklore studies, oral history, and disability history in journals, chapters in edited books, and as introductions to books.  He is currently working on a study of the creative folklore and writing projects of the FWP and on a biography of B. A. Botkin. New directions in his work are reflected in his recent essays, “Federal Writers’ Project,” in Ichiro Takayoshi ed., American Literature in Transition, 1930-1940 and “B. A. Botkin,” http://methods.sagepub.com/foundations

Brian Dolinar

Dr. Brian Dolinar is an independent scholar living in Urbana, Illinois. He is author of The Black Cultural Front: Black Writers and Artists of the Depression Generation (University Press of Mississippi, 2012) and editor of The Negro in Illinois: The WPA Papers(University of Illinois Press, 2013). He has taught history and African American Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Susan Rubenstein DeMasi

Susan Rubenstein DeMasi is the author of Henry Alsberg: The Driving Force of the New Deal Federal Writers’ Project (McFarland & Company 2016), as well as a screenwriter, playwright, and freelance journalist. She’s presented on the topic of the Federal Writers’ Project at various libraries, universities and other venues, including the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Museum and the University of California at Berkeley. She’s served as a research associate for the Living New Deal (livingnewdeal.org) since 2017. Her dramatic writing includes the WPA-themed documentary play, Ten Thousand Stories, produced for both the stage and radio (starring Simon Jones). An adjunct librarian at Suffolk County Community College in New York, DeMasi has written for The New York Times and other publications, and is currently at work on an essay for an upcoming book on the Writers’ Project to be published by the University of Massachusetts Press.

Catherine Stewart

Catherine A. Stewart is Professor of History at Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa, where she teaches courses in late nineteenth and twentieth-century U.S. social and cultural history, such as the Documentary Imagination during the Great Depression, Public Memory and Public History, Work and Leisure in Modern America, Reel History: The Cold War and American Film, and African American Autobiography and Film. Her research interests include the New Deal, African American writers, public memory, film, and the politics of textual and visual representation. She received her Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Her first book, Long Past Slavery: Representing Race in the Federal Writers’ Project (University of North Carolina Press, 2016), was selected as an Outstanding Academic Title by Choice magazine. She has presented her work at the annual meetings of the Organization of American Historians, the Northeast Modern Languages Association, the American Association for the History of Medicine, and the University of Houston’s Black History Workshop. Her work has appeared in American Quarterly, Labor: Studies in Working-Class History, and Civil War History, and an article is forthcoming in the Journal of American History. She is contributing a chapter on the non-fiction essays of Ann Petry, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and Zora Neale Hurston for the Cambridge University Press series, African American Literature in Transition, 1750-2015, edited by Joycelyn Moody. She is currently working on her next book on African American women and household labor during the Great Depression, for which she was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship.

Stephanie Jones-Rogers

Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers is an associate professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South. Her research focuses primarily upon gender and American slavery, but I am equally fascinated with colonial and 19th century legal and economic history, especially as it pertains to women, systems of bondage, and the slave trade.

Sara Rutkowski

Sara Rutkowski is an Assistant Professor of English at the City University of New York: Kingsborough Community College. She is the author of The Literary Legacies of the Federal Writers’ Project: Voices of the Depression in the American Postwar Era (Palgrave, 2017), and has also published work on postwar American writers and the cultural and political contexts of twentieth century global literature. She is currently at work editing a collection of essays that showcases a range of new research and scholarship on the FWP.

John Edgar Tidwell

John Edgar Tidwell is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Kansas. He describes his work this way: “When I looked back on my career, I discovered that my teaching often intersected with my research, thus enabling one to shape and inform the other. It is in this spirit that I considered American literature indispensable in contextualizing African American literature. Neither could be studied in isolation. Both provided a fuller discussion of the other. Over the years, I have conducted considerable research into Sterling A. Brown, Frank Marshall Davis, and Langston Hughes—all poets who were pivotal figures in the history of African American writing. Much of what I have published has been foundational scholarship, restoring and extending these powerful voices to current discussions of African American and American cultural expression.”  Among his several publications are After Winter: The Art and Life of Sterling A. Brown, Writings of Frank Marshall Davis: A Voice of the Black Press, and Montage of a Dream: The Art and Life of Langston Hughes.

Betsy Bowen

Betsy Bowen is a professor of English and director of the writing center at Fairfield University. Her research in community literacy, English Education, and women and literacy have been published in journals including Community Literacy Journal, Business Communication Quarterly, English Education, and Journal of Adult and Adolescent Literacy. She has led professional development workshops for teachers of English in Russia and Kyrgyzstan.  In 2010, she was select by the Carnegie Foundation for Advancement of Teaching as its Connecticut Professor of the Year. At this institute, she will discuss her ongoing digital humanities project called “Writing Freedom,” which features student research focusing on acts of literacy described by ex-slaves in FWP’s “Born in Slavery” collection.

David Jolliffe

David Jolliffe is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Arkansas, where he was the initial occupant of the Brown Chair in English Literacy.  He earned a B.A. in English, magna cum laude, from Bethany College in 1974; an M.A. in English from West Virginia University in 1980; and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Texas in 1984.  A native of New Martinsville, West Virginia, Jolliffe began his career as an educator at Triadelphia High School and then at Wheeling Park High School, where he taught both English and theatre.  Jolliffe has also taught at West Virginia University, Bethany, the University of Texas, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and DePaul University.  At the University of Illinois at Chicago, he served as the Director of Composition, Director of the Writing Center, and Director of Writing in the Disciplines in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.  At DePaul, he was Director of Writing Programs for one year before becoming the initial Director of the Interdisciplinary First-Year Program. He moved to Fayetteville in 2005 to inaugurate the work of the Brown Chair, whose mission is to promote critical and effective literacy among Arkansans in all walks of life.

The author or editor of 14 books and more than 40 articles on the history and theory of rhetoric, the teaching of writing, and the preparation of writing teachers—most recently The Arkansas Delta Oral History Project: Culture, Place, and Authenticity, published by Syracuse University Press—Jolliffe has always connected his work to the arts, particularly to theatre. His office sponsored a program called SISTA (Students Involved in Sustaining Their Arkansas), which linked Arkansas High School students with University of Arkansas mentors as both parties develop proposals for community sustainability projects, and the Arkansas Studio Project, which offered arts-infused literacy-enrichment activities in secondary schools in Springdale, Arkansas.  He acts regularly with The Classical Edge Theatre Company, which offers free, outdoor productions of William Shakespeare’s works in Northwest Arkansas and throughout the state, and with the Northwest Arkansas Prison Story Project, which develops and performs original plays based on the writing of incarcerated inmates.  Recently, he initiated the Latin/x Youth Theatre Project and produced a new play called FOLLOW ME@TIO SAM.

Laurie Grobman

Dr. Laurie Grobman, a professor of English and women’s studies at Penn State Berks, has been involved with community writing for 20 years. Primary among this work is the facilitation of community-engaged scholarship and pedagogy to (re)write local histories of marginalized ethnic, racial, socioeconomic and cultural communities in Berks County and the city of Reading in Pennsylvania (see https://sites.psu.edu/localhistories/). Laurie has published several articles that address various ethical challenges emerging from community-engaged pedagogy focused on antiracism in such venues as CCC and College English. She has coauthored two articles with undergraduates: “Collaborative Complexities: Co-Authorship, Voice, and African American Rhetoric in Oral History Community Literacy Projects” (Community Literacy Journal, 2015) and “Counternarratives: Community Writing and Anti-Racist Rhetoric” (Reflections: A Journal of Public Rhetoric, Civic Writing, and Service-Learning, 2017). Laurie’s article, “‘Engaging Race’: Critical Race Inquiry and Community-Engaged Scholarship,” received the 2018 NCTE Richard C. Ohmann Outstanding Article in College English Award.

Candace Epps-Robertson

Dr. Candace Epps-Robertson is an assistant professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she currently holds the inaugural Jonathan M. Hess Term Professorship. She researches, writes, and teaches about rhetoric, literacy, and writing studies. Her primary research investigates how communities teach, practice, and understand what it means to be a citizen. Her first book, Resisting Brown​ (Pittsburgh, 2018), examined a free school's approach to teaching literacy and citizenship during the American Civil Rights Movement. She is currently working on several projects that creatively connect her interests in literacy, rhetoric, citizenship, and pedagogy. Her second project examines conceptions of global citizenship through transcultural fandom experiences in the BTS ARMY fandom.