Jennifer Tuttle (Dorothy M. Healy Professor of Literature and Health, UNE School of Arts and Humanities, and 2021-22 Ludcke Chair of Liberal Arts and Sciences), presented a paper called “Contrary Reading: On the Missing Plays of Dolores Michel” at the Society for the Study of American Women Writers triennial conference in Philadelphia on Nov. 6, 2025.
Tuttle’s paper concerned her book project in process, a literary biography of Dora Louise Mitchell (1891-1970), a Black woman of modest means who often self-obscured through racial passing under the name Dolores Michel. Such a biography is challenging–yet that much more important–because Mitchell’s writing appeared in highly ephemeral venues, including silent films, Black newspapers, pulp magazines, and local theater, and biographically, only scant traces of her life remain. Tuttle’s book recounts Mitchell’s life chronologically in chapters that roughly adhere to the various genres in which she wrote. The present conference paper, however, focused on how to write the chapter about her plays, co-authored with two white women and written under the pseudonym Michel, when the actual plays are missing.
In the absence of the plays themselves, Tuttle investigates the work’s reception, the principal figures involved in its writing, and the circumstances of its production for the stage. This research, Tuttle argues, offers alternative ways into Mitchell’s story and illuminates the stories of other women unjustly silenced in the historical record. While there is much that that this book will say about the substance of Mitchell’s writing, then, and how it informs a portrait of her fascinating life, a large portion of the project concerns how we lose women’s writing—especially Black women’s writing—yet how their stories persevere, and how we as scholars might amplify them.
Jennifer Tuttle, PhD, Dorothy M. Healy Professor of Literature & Health, recently received the Westbrook College Alumni Association Honorary Alumni Award. Given annually by the Westbrook College Alumni Board of Directors, this award honors an individual who has shown high interest and given substantial service to the Westbrook College Alumni Association. At the award ceremony during Reunion Weekend on June 7th, 2025, Tuttle was recognized for the ways she has championed the Westbrook College legacy throughout her long and dedicated career at UNE. The award acknowledged the positive impact she has had on students, faculty, and staff through her thoughtful leadership as the director of the Maine Women Writers Collection, as a professor of literature, and as co-founder of the Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies Program.
Jennifer Tuttle, PhD, Dorothy M. Healy Professor of Literature & Health, was recently interviewed by Dr. Pamela Toler of the blog “History in the Margins” in observation of Women’s History Month. March 19, 2025 – in “Talking About Women’s History: Three Questions and an Answer with Jennifer Tuttle,” Tuttle discusses the challenges and significance of archival research for her current book project, a literary biography of Dora L. Mitchell. This biography, which focuses not only on a historical woman but on a little-known Black woman whose life is very sparsely documented, requires ever more persistence of the researcher and demands, as Tuttle explains, that even the most seasoned scholars must continue to expand their skills in order to do justice to Mitchell’s life and work. Tuttle also touts the research resources available at UNE’s Maine Women Writers Collection (MWWC) and reflects on the history of the MWWC’s founding.Jennifer Tuttle presented a paper on lost fiction from Black Los Angeles at the C19: Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists Conference in Pasadena, CA.
Jennifer Tuttle (Dorothy M. Healy Professor of Literature and Health, UNE School of Arts and Humanities, and 2021-22 Ludcke Chair of Liberal Arts and Sciences), presented a paper on “Lost Fiction from Black Los Angeles” in Pasadena, CA on March 15, 2024.
Tuttle’s paper was presented as part of a panel on Lost Things at the C19: Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists Conference. She discussed two 1914 stories published by Dora L. Mitchell in the Los Angeles Times Illustrated Weekly Magazine, which was tucked into the newspaper on weekends. Because the Weekly was not microfilmed with the rest of the Times in the 1940s, it is missing from research databases widely in use today, which rely on that microfilm. That, Tuttle explained, is merely one of a cascading series of losses that has led to these stories being missing from the historical record.
While the material loss of the texts themselves illuminates the fragility of print history, Tuttle argued, the fact of their loss forces the question of how to grapple with archival absences and what it means to recover Black women’s writing in California from these early years. Mitchell published these stories under the pen-name she used for racial passing, in a venue that the Times itself recently admitted overtly advocated white supremacy. Tuttle concluded that, although missing, Mitchell’s stories in the Weekly can help the researcher piece together a larger picture of Mitchell’s protean authorship and scrappy politics; they also upend critical expectations about where and how to look for Black women’s texts.
Jennifer Tuttle, Ph.D., Dorothy M. Healy professor of Literature and Health in the University of New England School of Arts and Humanities and 2021-2022 Ludcke Chair of Liberal Arts and Sciences, has published a peer-reviewed essay in “The Routledge Companion to Gender and the American West,” the first major collection to remap the American West though the intersectional lens of gender and sexuality, especially in relation to race and Indigeneity. Read more
Tuttle has published a peer-reviewed essay titled “Recollecting Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Archival Labor and Women’s Literary Recovery”. Read more
Tuttle presented her paper “Undergraduate Editors in the Digital Domain: Reinventing the Research Paper,” reported on how she used ePortfolio in her Topics in Literature and Health course, “Madness in Literature,” in the fall 2020 semester. Read more