In honor of the SEA’s 30th anniversary year, we are proud to present a special “double feature” Scholar of the Month, honoring Dennis Moore and Dan Williams, two of the Society’s founding members. In these interviews, enjoy their responses to some special questions about the SEA’s beginnings and future!
SEA Scholar of the Month, July 2022: Dennis Moore
Three springtimes ago I retired as a University Distinguished Teaching Professor in Florida State’s English Department. That August, I learned that the University of Georgia Press was issuing a paperback of my Crèvecoeur edition, which they had published 25 years earlier. In the interim, of course, Harvard University Press had published my Letters . . . and Other Essays.
How did you become interested in studying early American literature?
By August ’84, when I entered the PhD program at Chapel Hill, I’d gotten to teach some so-called sophomore lit courses, and I certainly enjoyed being around Wheatley, Equiano, Rowlandson et al. and thinking about the ways their presence bled into and complicated the history I’d always relished reading about, as a kid and then as an undergrad and even while doing my MA. My first week as a PhD wannabe, I met Everett Emerson, the prof who’d come there a year earlier from Amherst, bringing with him the journal EAL. Soon I was working part-time as the journal’s copy-editor and realizing how much there was to learn about early American writers and about their relationship to Atlantic history in general as well as to anglophone literature in particular.
Who is your favorite early American writer, or what is your favorite early American text, and why?
Surprise: the ambitious, shape-shifting fellow who created Farmer James has continued to fascinate me, as do the pieces he didn’t wedge into that little collection of fictions, Letters (London, 1782) or in the French versions thereof. I certainly thank the late Everett Emerson for pointing out, in one of our earliest conversations, that the MSS had made their way from France all the way to the Library of Congress.
What are you currently working on?
One project is a brief history of SECAS (Society for Eighteenth-Century American Studies), in keeping with the emphasis at last Fall’s SEA Seminar on “Origin Stories & Early American Studies.” As many colleagues will recall, SECAS (within which the SEA’s Essay Prizes originated!) preceded the SEA as the Americanist affiliate of the American Society of Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS). There are also projects I do via Visions, Revisions & Moore, the freelance operation I had started before starting on my PhD; an example was helping the editors of the new Broadview Anthology sharpen the focus of what they were going to say about Crèvecoeur in their first volume.
I’ve also created a couple of what amount to legacy projects. One is the Barbara Stevens Heusel Research Fund for Early-Career Scholars, within the international Iris Murdoch Appreciation Society. Barbara, my far-better half, had created the Iris Murdoch Society in New York City in December 1986, at the MLA. She went on to publish two fine books on Dame Iris, tracing links between her novels and her writings as an Oxford don who taught and wrote about philosophy. There’re also the Moore Family Scholarships for First-Generation Students at my undergraduate alma mater Clemson (where Rhondda Robinson Thomas, Nafees Khan and JBF are), which I cooked up with the help of Susanna Ashton, who at the time was chair of that department. My energies are also currently going to my roles as a member of the statewide board of the Friends of the Museum of Florida History and as a member of both FSU’s Libraries Advancement Board and the steering committee of FSU’s Civil Rights Institute. At its 2019 biennial SASA conference, my colleagues on the board surprised my wife and me by announcing the creation of these travel grants for grad students.
What is something you are reading right now (EAL related or otherwise) that inspires you, either personally or professionally?
Reading historian Tiya Miles’ All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, A Black Family Keepsake has been a highlight of the past year. It’s the most recent of the many books I’ve read to Barbara throughout our four decades together. There’re also the books around which I’ve organized what’s now a series of “60+ “Colloquy with the Author” sessions, many at SEA conferences large and small and many at conferences of two even larger interdisciplinary orgs, ASECS and the American Studies Association. In fact, at four of the five most recent conferences of SASA, the southeastern affiliate of the A.S.A., the keynote speaker has agreed to participate in one of these roundtables (most recently, think Imani Perry). These sessions have been for me as well as, mehopes, for the various panelists and the members of the respective audiences, quite a movable feast.
Can you share a favorite memory from a past SEA conference?
Here’re three among many. At the 2017 conference, in Tulsa, there was the session that ended with a hearty standing ovation for Annette Kolodny’s paper on having convinced the NYTBR not to delete her reference to genocide vis-à-vis Andrew Jackson; R.I.P., Annette (but not Old Hickory). A decade earlier it was an honor and a pleasure to cochair, as SEA president, our first-ever joint conference with the Omohundro Institute at Williamsburg and, of course, Jamestown. In 2019, Tom Krise staged our biennial conference in Hamilton, Bermuda, and in the colloquy on Marcus Rediker’s The Slave Ship: A Human History, the first comment from the audience was from historian Ned Blackhawk, who asked about Barry Unsworth’s novel Sacred Hunger. Elsewhere I’ve described the way that question raised the level of discourse at that session; the lively discussion spilled over to the reception Tom had arranged to take place across the road at Bacardi’s HQ. For good measure here’s a Thank-You to Tom as well as to Laura Stevens and Gordon Sayre for having pried us away from assuming our biennial conferences had to happen along the eastern seaboard if not in Chicago.
What has been the most promising development you’ve seen in the SEA over the past 30 years, and what do you hope for its future?
From the get-go, the SEA was a group of smart, savvy scholars willing to work together and learn together. In that first decade we began morphing into an interdisciplinary group, for which I am especially grateful. Since then we’ve beautifully intensified our emphasis on nurturing young scholars, helping them to develop skills and contacts that are basic to effective networking (I’m honored to have been the founding mentor for the Junior Scholars’ Caucus). Talk about networking writ large: it’s great to see the Book Prizes, in conjunction with the journal EAL and with the MLA’s Forum on EAL. Our conferences continue to be wonderfull, with our smaller, topical off-year conferences having morphed into the Mobile Archives Workshop, and now there’s the Seminar Series.
On that note, I’m pleased to have been able to help strengthen our ties to those two large orgs I named above, ASECS and the A.S.A. By the mid-’90s it was increasingly obvious that many of us were members of both the SEA and SECAS, the Society for Eighteenth-Century American Studies. The latter is now quite defunct, given that we merged the two, making the SEA the Americanist affiliate within ASECS. As for the hyperpresentist A.S.A., here’s another origin story: I’m glad to have called that org’s command module 16 summers ago to say a couple dozen colleagues and I wanted to form a group as part of the new caucuses; the name Early American Matters stuck and morphed, three years ago, into the Early Americas Caucus. Sari Altschuler was an NYU grad student when Cristobal Silva introduced us (at an A.S.A. conference), and I’m forever grateful that she agreed to be the caucus’s co-coordinator with me for a decade or so and then to co-coordinate with Peter Reed. For years he had tirelessly worked at noodging the rest of us to turn in tantalizingly superb proposals for A.S.A. conferences, and his managing the caucus nowadays is quite the example of selfless service. So I join y’all in
Looking forward!
Dr. Dennis D. Moore is an Independent Scholar.
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SEA Scholar of the Month, July 2022: Dan Williams
How did you become interested in studying early American literature?
I was blessed to have the great scholar and wonderful teacher Robert D. Richardson as my mentor. I loved his classes and came to love the man, as he saw something in me that I did not. At the same time I was living in Colorado and became involved in environmental issues after reading Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang. I then happened to pick up a copy of a now forgotten but truly marvelous book, John Bakeless’s Eyes of Discovery, and I was hooked. While surveying a broad range of discovery and exploration narratives, Bakeless opened up, literally, a new world. To echo a popular songwriter of the time, Joni Mitchell, I became interested in reading about America before “they paved paradise/ And put up a parking lot.”
Who is your favorite early American writer, or what is your favorite early American text, and why?
When pressed by people to name an author they would recognize, I usually mention Ben Franklin, whose writing and life I greatly admire, but I was lucky enough to start my career as part of a group of scholars intent on breaking up the canon, and most of my work involved non-canonical early American narratives, particular criminal and captivity narratives. At that time Readex had just reproduced the entire Charles Evans Early American Imprint Series on microcards—the cutting-edge technology of the period—and suddenly the entire range of American printed material from 1639 to 1800 became available. Thousands of titles became accessible, and I became fascinated by exploring texts that probably had not been read for a couple centuries. This was, literally, another new world to be explored.
What are you currently working on?
Since becoming Director of TCU Press a decade ago, much of my time has been devoted to publishing the work of others, but I have tried to remain active in the field with articles and reviews. My big project right now is to publish a new critical edition of Ann Carson’s Memoir. I think Carson’s writing is highly relevant yet still often overlooked.
What is something you are reading right now (EAL related or otherwise) that inspires you, either personally or professionally?
Thich Nhat Hanh’s The Art of Living. Hanh passed recently, and I wanted to reread one of his best books.
As a founding member of the SEA, would you be willing to share what stood out to you about its mission then, and its mission now? How, for example, did early members conceive of the SEA in conversation with the larger ASECS arm, or the American Studies Association?
I am not sure I am a founding member of anything, but John Samson and I created an early American organization affiliate for ASECS, the Society for Eighteenth Century American Studies, primarily because we really liked ASECS and wanted to keep going to the conferences. Others quickly joined us, David Shields, Frank Shuffelton, Tom Krise, Dennis Moore, Zabelle Stodola, Lisa Logan, and Sharon Harris among the first. The whole field of early American print culture was opening up in profound ways, and we all were lucky to be active at that time. When I first became interested in early American texts, there were few writers accepted into the standard canon, and most literary histories, such as Fred Lewis Pattee’s A History of American Literature since 1870, skipped over the entire period, apologizing for the lack of good writing in early America. I think all of us in various ways wanted to rewrite the history of early American print culture.
Can you share a favorite memory from a past SEA conference?
That’s a tough question, as I think I have only missed one since the first conference. What I remember most are the wonderful meals and fellowship I shared with friends, especially with those I’ve named above. What wonderful times we had together.
What has been the most promising development you’ve seen in the SEA over the past 30 years, and what do you hope for its future?
The most promising development I have seen are successive waves of new scholars coming into the field and extending the work and scope of those of us previously at work in early American print culture. I am honored when great scholars like Jodi Schorb and Anthony Vaver still mention my work.
Is there a scholar in the field who inspires you, and why?
Without Robert D. Richardson and his kind patient help, I would not have been able to spend four decades in higher education. While his greatest work was on Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and William James, Bob Richardson was also equally comfortable teaching early American literature, especially with poets and poetry. To this day I can still hear his eloquent words describe Freneau’s “The Wild Honey Suckle.”
Dan Williams is TCU Honors Professor of Humanities and Director of TCU Press at Texas Christian University.