So sorry to have kept you waiting all of these weeks, but I’m so delighted to finally and truly make your acquaintance. I’m also quite excited to be working with Rebus to get this Open Anthology developed and into more literature courses.
We’re fortunate–due to the yeoman’s work by Robin DeRosa and her class and Abby Goode and her class, and the work of my own Early American literature students last fall–to have an excellent head start as far as curated chapter texts go. Some of those chapters are even complete with fleshed out “paratextual” materials like introductions and videos.
As to the project’s next steps, I am finally calling on your expertise and energy to begin filling in the blanks and polishing out the spots. We’re lucky to have such an array of talented and devoted researchers, scholars, and librarians on the forum, and I am eager to work with all of you on this project.
Zoe has been good enough to design the following spreadsheet that lays out our needs in terms of missing authors and texts; it also notes which aspects of the current anthology warrant a closer look.
At this point, I am issuring an open invite to forum respondents to request the authors and/or texts they most desire or would feel most comfortable working on. Please feel free to digitally pencil in your name and any thoughts or suggestions in the spreadsheet above. In the meantime, I’ll be asking for support from colleagues, and, eventually, I might have to tap certain individuals on the forum with more particular requests, i.e. I might be bugging you in the future. Forgive me in advance!
I look forward to talking and working with all of you in the coming months. I’m off to teach, but I’ll be eagerly awaiting your responses!
Hi All-
My name is Meghan and I’d love to help with this project! I am a third year PhD student in Early American and Antebellum Literature, Culture, & Medicine at Texas Tech University.
I’ve added a few text recommendations to the spreadsheet in bold and I penciled in my name in a few spots.
Hi Tim and all, I teach 2 sections of the Early American Survey course at Collin County Community College in Plano, Texas. I am planning on both using the anthology in the course this fall and recruiting my students to work on it as well. I would LOVE to see any project guidelines for getting students involved. Are there any assignments you’ve used in class for contributing to the anthology that you could share?
@patricia.bostian Awesome news for us, Patricia! I’m coordinating contact info from this forum, the Google doc, and my email, so I should be in touch again this weekend with questions and plans for the summer.
@lrdavis Thank you for the reply and welcome aboard! You know, we’re actually looking to compile assignments and project guidelines for insertion into the anthology, so I am more than happy to send along what I used last fall (I’ll be tinkering with the structure a bit for this coming year). Whats your email address?
@trobbins1981 Fantastic! I’d love to be part of that project, too. My email is lrdavis@collin.edu. I saw your post to the EARAM-L listserv, thanks for posting about this work there. --Lisa Roy-Davis
Hello, My name is Emily Butler-Probst and I am a graduate student in English at University of Colorado, Boulder. I am very interested in helping with this project! There are a few authors I could write introductions for (Susanna Rowson, Olaudah Equiano) as well as some texts that I could help with as well. I am particularly knowledgeable about works that Herman Melville has written, but I can help with other American Renaissance authors too. I really appreciate your efforts to put together an accessible, affordable anthology for students.
@lrdavis Hi Lisa! I’ll add to Tim’s message that we (Rebus) are working on some other resources that might be helpful for running an assignment similar to Tim’s, including a guide to Creative Commons licensing for students, and a light MOU to make sure students understand their rights and responsibilities for the project. They’re in progress at the moment, but if you think they might be useful I can send them your way when they’re done.
@emmaprobst42 Hi Emily, thanks for joining us! I’ll let @trobbins1981 talk details on the different author intros & texts, but great to have you on board
@sonyaparrish Hi Sonya! So great to have you on board. I’ll be messaging the forum (and emailing folks) tomorrow with more details on the project moving forward.
@robertpaulwilson Hi Robert! So great to have you on board. I’ll be messaging the forum (and emailing folks) tomorrow with more details on the project moving forward.
I have put my name on the following authors/topics on the spreadsheet for intros and text research: Mayan Chilam Balam, Bartolome De Las Casas, The Requerimiento, The Narranganset “Act of Submission”, Pontiac, and William Dean Howells. Very excited to be working on these!
