Description: Rethinks the life, writings and legacies of Phillis Wheatley Peters in a global context from the eighteenth century to the contemporary period.
Brief description: Barbara McCaskill is Distinguished Research Professor of English and a faculty affiliate of Women's Studies and African American Studies at the University of Georgia. She is also Associate Academic Director of the Willson Center for Humanities & Arts. In 2023, she co-organized 'The Genius of Phillis Wheatley Peters' public humanities project with Sarah Ruffing Robbins and Mona Narain. She has authored, edited or co-edited numerous books on African American and Ethnic American Literature, including African American Literature in Transition, 1880-1900 with Caroline Gebhard (forthcoming 2026); The Magnificent Rev. Peter Thomas Stanford with Sidonia Serafini (2020) and her monograph, Love, Liberation, and Escaping Slavery: William and Ellen Craft in Culture Memory (2015). She serves as co-P.I. with Nicholas Allen of Culture and Community at the Penn Center National Historic Landmark District, a multi-year, multi-institutional grant consisting of student residencies, community fellows, an artist-in-residence, and public conversations, and funded by the Mellon Foundation.
Review Quotes: There has never been a better time to be a scholar of Phillis Wheatley Peters, as this extraordinary volume shows. The Lives, Writings and Legacies of Phillis Wheatley Peters is a tribute to the genius and enduring power of one of our greatest poets.--Joseph Rezek, Boston University