SEA Featured Scholar, March 2025: Chip Badley
How did you become interested in studying early American literature?
One is not born, but becomes an Early Americanist though any number of conversions. Mine was in 2017, when I attended my first SEA conference in Tulsa and realized just how energizing the “field” can be. I put “field” in scare quotes only because the people I met there and am thinking of are unlikely to identify as Early Americanists per se but came to this period from environmental history, gender and sexuality studies, Native American studies, the legal humanities, and so on. Because I study aesthetics and queerness, the eighteenth century is a key period.
Who is your favorite early American writer, or what is your favorite early American text, and why?
Reading, researching, and teaching Phillis Wheatley (Peters) is one of the best parts of my job. Especially after 2023—the annus mirabilis of the special issue of Early American Literature edited by Tara Bynum, Brigitte Fielder, and Cassander Smith; David Waldstreicher’s The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley; and the Genius of Phillis Wheatley Peters project at the University of Georgia and Texas Christian University, among many, many others—there seems to be no limit as to what her poems and life can tell us. Like most of my “favorite” texts, I’m not sure why I’m so attached to her poems, but I suspect it has something to do with the audacity of her imagination and the originality of her insights.
What are you currently working on?
Most of my energies are devoted to my book manuscript, Kindred Arts: Painting and Queerness in American Literature. In the short term, that involves an article on Fitz-Greene Halleck’s ekphrastic poetry (forthcoming in American Literary History). I’ve started work on a second book-length project concerning women’s and queer photography in the nineteenth century, a small portion of which will appear in the New England Quarterly. I’m also completing some shorter standalone essays on topics including Joan of Arc plays from the 1790s, Niagara Falls travel sketches, and Henry James.
What is something you are reading right now (EAL related or otherwise) that inspires you, either personally or professionally?
I’m teaching a seminar on food writing, so I’m reading just about everything M.F.K. Fisher ever wrote. Although the seminar isn’t especially Early or American, Amelia Simmons’ American Cookery (1796) prompted me to start thinking about culinary literature. I’m still figuring out just what is being inspired by Fisher and food studies scholarship, so we’ll see! But, thankfully, EAL-related reading inspires my own research: Ben Bascom’s Feeling Singular: Queer Masculinities in the Early United States (2024), Thomas Koenigs’ Founded in Fiction: The Uses of Fiction in the Early United States (2021), and Shelby Johnson’s The Rich Earth Between Us: The Intimate Grounds of Race and Sexuality in the Atlantic World, 1770-1840 (2024) have been echoing across my thoughts and teaching.
Is there a scholar in the field who inspires you, and why?
I’m very fortunate to have very inspiring friends; I trust they know who they are. But if I’m in a room with Jesse Alemán, Ben Bascom, Greta LaFleur, Don James McLaughlin, Meredith Neuman, or Jordan Stein, I know I’m in the right place.
Chip Badley is a lecturer in the English department at the University of California, Davis.