WEBCAST:

Shirley Moody-Turner is an associate professor of English and African American Studies at Pennsylvania State University. She teaches courses in African American literature, black print cultures, critical race studies, and folklore studies.  Her first book, Black Folklore and the Politics of Racial Representation tells the story of how folklore became a lynchpin in US debates over Jim Crow segregation, while her current book, Privately Printed: Anna Julia Cooper and the Gender Politics of Black Publishing, examines how the intersecting dynamics of race and gender have impacted African American literary production. She has published numerous articles and essays in these areas, and is currently the volume editor for African American Literature in Transition 1900-1910 (Cambridge University Press).  In 2016 she founded the Cooper – Du Bois Mentoring Program, and in 2017, she worked with Howard University to digitize the Anna Julia Cooper Papers held at the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center (http://dh.howard.edu/ajcooper/).

During her time as a Hutchins Center fellow, she will work on her monograph, Privately Printed: Anna Julia Cooper and the Gender Politics of Black Publishing, which takes the case of Anna Julia Cooper to help make visible a “shadow tradition” of black women’s writing that exceeded the bounds of conventional publishing protocols.