Institute Director

Howard Rambsy II, who will serve as Project Director, is Professor of Literature at SIUE. He has taught a wide range of American and African American literature courses, and he has coordinated more than 300 public humanities projects concentrating on African American literature and cultural history. He is the author of The Black Arts Enterprise (2011) and Bad Men: Creative Touchstones of Black Writers (2020). Douglass’s Narrative has been a mainstay in Rambsy’s literature courses since 2003; he coordinated summer reading groups focusing on Douglass’s autobiography each summer from 2008 – 2015; and he curated public exhibits on editions of Douglass’s book in 2015 and 2016. Rambsy has several experiences working with NEH Institutes, including directing an institute on Douglass in 2019.

Resident Faculty

Tisha Brooks will serve as a resident faculty member. Brooks is an Associate Professor of English at SIUE.  With a focus on African American Literature, Women’s Studies, and Religion, Brooks’ scholarship and teaching explores continuities between 19th-, 20th-, and 21st-century African American autobiography.  Douglass’ autobiographies are a foundational part of the majority of Brooks’ face-to-face and online courses, in which students also have the opportunity to work extensively with mixed media resources related to Douglass’ writing and speaking, engage with 19th-century visual culture, and create their own mixed media projects. Brooks uses digital resources and technology extensively to help students bridge gaps in historical, disciplinary, and experiential knowledge.

Elizabeth Cali will serve as a resident faculty member. Cali is an Associate Professor of English at SIUE. She has given scholarly presentations on 19th-century African American print culture and its transnational and diasporic implications at national and regional conferences. Cali’s developing book manuscript “Pauline Hopkins, Radical Race Editor,” explores African American woman Pauline Hopkins’s editorship of the Colored American Magazine. Additionally, Cali teaches Frederick Douglass’s writings across general education and topic-specific English courses at SIUE. Her experience engaging students with Douglass’s materials and contexts is a skillset which will be instrumental in providing guidance and assistance to Summer Scholars.

Visiting Faculty

Maryemma Graham, University Distinguished Professor of English and the 2020 Chancellor Club Teaching Awardee at the University of Kansas, is founding director of the Project on the History of Black Writing, a digital archive and public humanities initiative that began in 1983. She has directed several NEH institutes and projects and has extensive experience introducing school educators to African American literary studies. Graham has published ten books, including The Cambridge History of African American Literature with Jerry W. Ward, Jr. (2011), The Cambridge Companion to the African American Novel (2004), Fields Watered with Blood: Critical Essays on Margaret Walker (2002), Teaching African American Literature: Theory and Practice (1998), and The Complete Poems of Frances E.W. Harper (1988) and more than 100 essays, book chapters, and creative works.

Barbara McCaskill is a professor of African American and American literature at the University of Georgia, where she is also the co-director of the Civil Rights Digital Library Initiative and Associate Academic Director of the Willson Center for Humanities & Arts. She is the author of The Magnificent Reverend Peter Thomas Stanford: Transatlantic Activist and Race Man (2020); Love, Liberation, and Escaping Slavery: William and Ellen Craft in Cultural Memory (2015), Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem: African American Literature and Culture, 1877-1919 (2006), “William and Ellen Craft, the Georgia Fugitives, and the War’s Uncertain Outcomes,” “Ellen Craft: The Fugitive Who Fled as a Planter, c. 1826-1891,” and “‘Trust No Man!’: But What About a Woman?: Ellen Craft and a Genealogical Model for Teaching Douglass’s Narrative,” among other books and scholarly articles.

Joycelyn Moody is Sue E. Denman Distinguished Chair in American Literature at the University of Texas at San Antonio founded the African American Literatures and Cultures Institute in 2009. She is co-editor with John Ernest of Regenerations: African American Literature and Culture reprint series for West Virginia University Press, through which she recently published a scholarly edition of the Memoirs of Elleanor Eldridge. Former Editor of African American Review, she is currently editing A History of African American Autobiography for Cambridge University Press.

Jessica DeSpain is Professor of English at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and author of Nineteenth-Century Transatlantic Reprinting and the Embodied Book (Routledge, 2014). She edits The Wide, Wide World Digital Edition, an exploration of reprints of Susan Warner’s bestselling novel. She has published several articles on the intersections of book history and digital humanities pedagogy. She also directed the NEH-funded Conversation Toward a Brighter Future program, which engages high school students and the community in intergenerational digital storytelling studios.

Jill Kirsten Anderson, Professor of English at SIUE, directs SIUE’s program in secondary English Education and supervises pre-service teachers. Dr. Anderson’s teaching interests range from early American literature to young adult literature and English education. She specializes in American novels from the early republic to the antebellum period, and she contributes to The Wide, Wide World Digital Edition, an exploration of the reprints of Susan Warner’s bestselling novel, edited by Jessica DeSpain. In her secondary English Language Arts methods courses, Anderson works through Douglass’s 1845 narrative with teacher candidates as they collect ideas and develop materials.

Bridget Nelson is an English Teacher at SIUE East Saint Louis Charter High School. She is in her ninth year with the high school and currently teaches English IV, English II, Dual Credit Career Development in conjunction with Lewis and Clark Community College, and Dual Credit English 101/102 in conjunction with Southwestern Illinois College. She also teaches English 101 and 102 evening courses as an adjunct for SWIC. Bridget is involved with extra-curricular activities which include Book Club and Photography Club in the after school 21st Century program.