Transatlantic Trajectories (feat. Melissa J. Homestead)

The WPHP Monthly Mercury

In July 2020, project lead Michelle Levy and lead editor Kandice Sharren attended a virtual workshop hosted by Amy Tims at the American Antiquarian Society titled “Searching the AAS Catalog: Keyword & Browse.” This workshop introduced them to the many specific and useful headings of the American Antiquarian Society catalog, including some that we were particularly excited for given that we see them in resources so rarely: “women as authors” and “women as publishers and printers.” In November 2021, the WPHP used these headings to import more than 6000 title records from the American Antiquarian Society. Our thrilling plunge into titles printed in the United States is something we’ve been anticipating, and started preparing for over the last two years: we added a ‘copyright statement’ field, for example, so that we could capture the copyright information located on the verso of the title page of many American titles.

While our team of research assistants works diligently to clean up these imported records and make them available to the public, we have been starting to think about what having this data in the WPHP might tell us about the transatlantic reprinting of women’s writing during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the process, we have had to grapple with new questions about how to best represent American titles within our data model. Thankfully, WPHP contributing scholar Dr. Melissa J. Homestead came to our rescue!

In Episode 9, “Transatlantic Trajectories,” hosts Kate Moffatt and Kandice Sharren introduce listeners to some of the joys and hiccups of the recent American import by way of a lively chat with Dr. Melissa J. Homestead about women’s American and transatlantic publishing. In it, we discuss transatlantic authors Susanna Rowson and Catharine Maria Sedgwick, as well as American copyright and its intricacies during the period, how studying book history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries can inform similar research in the twentieth, and the altar of chronology (with a special focus on Willa Cather and Edith Lewis, too!).

Melissa J. Homestead is Professor of English and Program Faculty in Women’s & Gender Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Having worked on authors from Susanna Rowson to Willa Cather, she considers her field to be American women’s writing, authorship, and publishing history of the very long nineteenth century. She is the author of American Women Authors and Literary Property, 1822-1869 (Cambridge University Press 2005) and The Only Wonderful Things: The Creative Partnership of Willa Cather and Edith Lewis (Oxford University Press 2021). She is Associate Editor of The Complete Letters of Willa Cather: A Digital Edition (ongoing), has collaborated on bibliographies of the works of Catharine Maria Sedgwick and E. D. E. N. Southworth, serves as President of the Catharine Maria Sedgwick Society, and is a member of the Board of Governors of the National Willa Cather Center. Cather expressed less than complimentary opinions in print about Southworth but, alas, she evidently never heard of Sedgwick.
If you're interested in learning more about what we discussed in this episode, you can find resources and suggestions for further reading here: https://womensprinthistoryproject.com/blog/post/96