BARS Blog

The opportunity afforded by the 2024 BARS Open Fellowship dovetailed with the incubation year of a new initiative called The Race and Regency Lab and its first project “Trust in the Archives.” Before I outline how the fellowship supported this work, I want to note that at each stage the BARS Open Fellowship has been generative. The application process was a useful opportunity to move from a vision for the Lab to a concrete plan. Winning the award lent important scholarly credibility to the project and has been essential in securing funding for future collaborations. Reflecting on the work the BARS Fellowship helped fund in 2024 has been especially helpful during a time when the values that inform the Lab are under attack in the United States. The BARS Open Fellowship supported a series of dialogues that served multiple communities and provided financial support for graduate students assisting with this work. Its impact extends beyond 2024 into the Lab’s work in 2025, specifically a seminar on Cheryl Harris’ contribution to Critical Race Studies and its importance to eighteenth and nineteenth-century studies. 

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The BARS Fellowship supported my efforts to recalibrate my service to the profession and the public. After more than ten years of coordinating and leading workshops, giving talks, and consulting with departments and colleges to put the research from my edited book Written/Unwritten: Diversity and the Hidden Truths of Tenure to work towards institutional change, I wanted to develop new spaces for thinking about the cultures and ideologies that underscore racial formations. I wanted to connect what I have learned from my diversity work to my research and public writing about Regency-era culture in order to better serve people in and beyond the academy. I believe that communities, and not just experts, make meaning, so I aimed to bring activists, artists, cultural critics, curators, fans, and scholars of color together to reexamine and reimagine how race operates in the Regency era. The Race and Regency Lab’s goal is to serve a set of interconnected communities that includes the general public and educators of all kinds–museum professionals, librarians, and teachers. Its mission is rooted in bell hooks’ assertions about the margins and marginality. In her essay “Choosing the Margins as a Space of Radical Openness” hooks writes about the possibilities to be found for those who occupy subject positions outside of hegemonic centers:

I was not speaking of marginality one wishes to lose—to give up or surrender as part of moving into the center—but rather of a site one stays in, clings to even, because it nourishes one’s capacity to resist. It offers to one the possibility of radical perspective from which to see and create, to imagine alternatives, new worlds.

bell hooks

The Lab’s inaugural year focused on how to develop new critical spaces while embracing the notion of radical margins in a series of interlocking activities: listening sessions, opportunities supporting scholars of color, and the project “Trust in the Archives,” a multi-institutional collaboration that focused on new acquisitions at the John Carter Brown Library. The BARS Open Fellowship supported these activities. It also provided research support for an intern funded by the Boston University Center for the Humanities and funded a research trip for the Norton Classic edition of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park I am currently preparing.

“Trust and the Archives” was organized by an international team of art historians, curators, historians, and literary scholars. We began with a shared understanding that the archive is primarily an edifice of whiteness that reflects its desired users. Sculptures, paintings, portraits, photos, statues, busts and friezes, pamphlets and brochures, maps, catalogs, as well as the faces of staff, and other researchers signal to people of color that the archive is a place designed by and for white users.  All of this impacts both who has access to the archives, their experience working with staff and leadership, and how they use its materials. Our goal was to address practices of exclusion. During a planning retreat sponsored by the Scholarly Communications Institute in October 2023 we worked on clarifying the Lab’s mission and our goals for the incubation grant we won from the New Jersey Council for the Humanities. We developed a three-year plan and discussed strategies for collaborating with programs and institutes. We planned an event that would contextualize two new John Carter Brown Library acquisitions—”Plan of a Section of Belvidere Estate,” and the first American edition of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park—and officially launch The Lab on September 13, 2024. We also planned the seminar series to re/reread Cheryl Harris’ Whiteness as Property.

Over five listening sessions that took place during the winter and spring of 2024, the Lab brought together regency fans, critics, curators, and scholars to think about how we can build meaningful connections. Leigh-Michil George (Scholar of 18^th and 19^th century literature and teacher, Geffen Academy, UCLA) Amanda- Rae Prescott, (freelance entertainment journalist) and Vanessa Valdéz (historian, curator, editor) helped plan and facilitate these sessions. They included discussions about decentering academic hierarchies, maintaining safe spaces where pleasure and expertise can co-exist, discussions about the ethics of collaboration, and the importance of sharing resources. In one listening session, Caroline McCaffrey Howarth (Lecturer History of Art/ Programme Director, Global Premodern Art, The University of Edinburgh) spoke to New Jersey museum curators and administrators about her work at the Victoria and Albert Museum bringing a diverse community of young people into the museum to engage materially with objects in its holdings.

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As a co-editor of the Oxford University Press series Race in Nineteenth-Century Literatures and Cultures, I was thrilled to collaborate with the Folger Institute on a pilot project for a manuscript workshop. One part of the Lab’s mission is to develop the work of scholars of color by providing the kind of support that tenured faculty, especially those at well-resourced, research-focused institutions, have access to. The series’ focus and the Folger Institute’s goals overlapped in generative ways for this project. The Folger is committed to expanding engagement with the library’s archive beyond its Shakespeare-related holding and seeks scholars whose work reveals how race operates in the early modern period; the series is interested in work that brings together critical work on the material and intellectual histories of race in the long nineteenth century. In May of 2024 we hosted a two-day manuscript workshop of Patricia Lott’s (Ursinus) book-in-progress with readers: Kimberly Brown (Dartmouth), Jasmine Nicole Cobb (Duke), and Lara Cohen (Swarthmore).

From June through August 2024, Boston University Center for the Humanities intern Constanza Robles completed researched for a project that provided context for the JCBL acquisitions. Constanza is completing her doctorate in Art History. Co-supervised by Joseph Rezek (Associate Professor of English and recent Director, American & New England Studies Program, Boston University) and myself, she spent the summer reading and researching for the project “Visualizing Property: A Virtual Exhibition.” Funds from BARS allowed Constanza to travel from Boston to New York City where completed research for the exhibit and met with Iris Moon, Associate Curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The two discussed methodological approaches to curation that deals with empire and history. 

In September 2024, The John Carter Brown Library hosted the launch of the Race and Regency Lab. As I explain in my summary of the day, the launch brought together a diverse, interdisciplinary group to discuss the significance of Plan of a Section of Belvidere Estate and Mansfield Park. As part of the day’s events, which were livestreamed, Constanza shared her exhibition with attendees. We were particularly thrilled to learn that Juliet Wells (Professor, Department of Visual, Literary, and Material Culture, Goucher College) has included the virtual exhibition as a resource for further information in her forthcoming edition of Mansfield Park for Penguin Random House. 

Our plan for a reading seminar focused on Cheryl Harris’ work was revised in response to interest from Amelia Worsley (Associate Professor of English, Amherst College) to co-host the project and an invitation from Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 (SEL) editor Amy Huseby (Senior Lecturer, Rice) to edit a special issue of the journal focused on how Critical Race Theory shapes the way that pre-1900 scholars think about culture and history. With funding from Amherst College and SEL, Amelia, Kim Hall (Lucyle Hook Professor of English, Professor of Africana Studies, Barnard), and I are co-convening a reading series that brings twelve people from England, New Zealand, and the United States together to think about Harris’s work. We have been in dialogue via Zoom with one another and will meet with Cheryl Harris via Zoom over the summer. This seminar will culminate in a series of public events in Amherst over three days in October with roundtables, a book event, and a public forum featuring Cheryl Harris. In 2026 a special issue of SEL featuring work by seminar members will be published. BARS funds have supported Constanza’s work as rapporteur for the seminar. 

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The BARS Open Fellowship has provided more than simply funds for these projects, though that has been essential in myriad ways. It allowed me to reflect on the ethics of bringing people of color together to discuss difficult histories and was an opportunity to clearly articulate to potential partners why material support is essential to this work. In rethinking the margins, hooks points not only to the possibility of radical reimagining but the importance nourishing one’s capacity to resist. I have thought carefully about what that means. As I sought funding for the Harris seminar, I argued that it has often been the case that institutions seek the input and work of people of color in support of diversity and equity initiatives. This work, I explained, is challenging in many ways. In the first place, it requires additional emotional energy as we are often writing about traumatic conditions at the very same time as we are encountering them. It exposes us to intense and sometimes targeted blow back. Further, this work cannot happen in an academic vacuum, but inviting activists, community organizers, fans, and freelance scholars, to share their thoughts without providing material support is exploitative. Finally, my goal is to ensure that everyone who joins the Lab for its projects leaves feeling revitalized and valued rather than depleted. The BARS Open Fellowship has been key to providing time and support to think through what this looks like intellectually, politically, and materially with a focus on community building. 

Patricia Matthew

Patricia Matthew is an Associate Professor of English at Montclair State University and specialist in nineteenth-century British literature and culture. She has edited and co-edited journal issues (Romantic Pedagogy Commons, European Romantic Review, and Studies in Romanticism); the edited volume Written/Unwritten: Diversity and the Hidden Truths of Tenure (University of North Carolina Press, 2016); and is co-editor of the new Oxford University Press series Race in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture. In addition to publishing in academic journals, she has written about Regency, race, and popular culture for The Atlantic, Lapham’s Quarterly, and The Times Literary Supplement. In 2020-2021 she was a Center for Diversity Innovation Distinguished Visiting Scholar at SUNY Buffalo, and in 2022-2023 she was the Anthony E. Kaye Fellow at the National Humanities Center. Her forthcoming work includes the Wondrium/audible.com lecture “Pride and Prejudice in the 21st Century.” She is currently writing a book about Britain’s sugar boycott, gender, and abolitionist culture for Princeton University Press and editing Mansfield Park for The Norton Library.

You can find Patricia’s university page here, and her personal website here.