Printing Early Modern Race: A Rare Books Workshop

Professor Kim Coles (Professor of English, Maryland), along with our colleague David Diamond (Assistant Professor of English and African American Studies, Georgia) will run a rare books centered workshop open to the public in the University of Georgia’s Special Collections Libraries building centered on the history of enslavement in conjunction with the 250th anniversary of the publication of Phyllis Wheatley Peters's book of poetry, the first published collection of poetry by an African American woman.

After brief introductions by Professors Coles and Diamond, the workshop will then turn to discussing and investigating items from the Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library on display relating to early Black poets, enslavement, and race, Hargrett’s collection not only includes the first edition of Wheatley Peters’s Poems on Various Subjects, but also an earlier edition of her Elegy (1771), along a number of other relevant items, including a broadside description of a slave ship from 1779, the papers of early American abolitionists, and eighteenth-century texts theorizing racial difference. Participants at the workshop will learn how Wheatley Peters was able to publish her poetry, the diversity of forms that early modern and eighteenth-century texts took, how to research subjects like racial history in a rare books archive, and how critical studies of race have been changing and invigorating rare books archival bibliography and scholarship.

This workshop is the second of two book symposium events connected to the UGA celebration and commemoration of Wheatley Peters's publication and is sponsored by the Wilson Center and a grant from the Bibliographical Society of America.