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