Preface to "Wheatley Pedagogies: A Forum on Teaching"

Abstract

Preface to "Wheatley PedagogiesA Forum on Teaching" Tara A. Bynum (bio), Brigitte Fielder (bio), and Cassander L. Smith (bio) The essays that constitute this pedagogy forum address strategies for teaching Wheatley by attending to both the context of her historical moment and our own. Importantly, the essays highlight strategies for teaching Wheatley in a variety of settings—classrooms, scholarly conferences, and public events. They also provide interdisciplinary approaches to studying her life and work. This forum makes clear that teaching Wheatley offers students transformative opportunities for profound learning and even unlearning. [End Page 797] Tara A. Bynum University of Iowa Brigitte Fielder University of Wisconsin–Madison Cassander L. Smith University of Alabama Tara A. Bynum tara a. bynum is an assistant professor of English and African American Studies at the University of Iowa. Her book Reading Pleasures: Everyday Black Living in Early America is forthcoming in fall 2022 from the New Black Studies Series at the University of Illinois Press. Brigitte Fielder brigitte fielder is an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She is the author of Relative Races: Genealogies of Interracial Kinship in Nineteenth-Century America (Duke UP, 2020) and coeditor of Against a Sharp White Background: Infrastructures of African American Print (U of Wisconsin P, 2019). She is currently writing a book about racialized human-animal relationships in the long nineteenth century, which shows how childhood becomes a key site for humanization and racialization. Cassander L. Smith cassander l. smith is an associate professor of English and associate dean for academic affairs in the Honors College at the University of Alabama. She is the author of Black Africans in the British Imagination: English Narratives of the Early Atlantic (LSU Press, 2016) and coeditor of The Earliest African American Literatures (UNC Press, 2021). Currently, she is working on a monograph, Race and Respectability in an Early Black Atlantic, under contract with LSU Press. The book examines respectability as a coping strategy for early Black Americans like Phillis Wheatley. Copyright © 2022 The University of North Carolina Press