Brenda Wineapple, the Doris Zemurray Stone Professor of Modern Literary and Historical Studies, will discuss her latest book, Ecstatic Nation: Confidence Crisis and Compromise, 1848-1877, Monday, April 21 at 7 p.m. in the Nott Memorial.
The talk is free and open to the public. A reception follows.
Ecstatic Nation combines political and cultural history to tell the complex story of how America faced the crime of slavery - and redefined the meaning of itself as one nation.
It was named a New York Times "Notable Book" of 2013, a KirkusBest Nonfiction of 2013 and a Bookpage Best Nonfiction of 2013.
To learn more, click here.
Wineapple is teaching a senior seminar on Dickinson and a course on American Literature in Historical Context: 19th Century this term.
Her talk is sponsored by the departments of English and History.
The recipient of a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2014, Wineapple was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2012. She has also won a 2009 Pushcart Prize, a Guggenheim fellowship, a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies and two National Endowment Fellowships in the Humanities.
Her other books include Genêt: A Biography of Janet Flanner; Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein; and Hawthorne: A Life, which received the Ambassador Award of the English-speaking Union for the best biography of 2003 and the Julia Ward Howe Prize from the Boston Book Club.
Her book, White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle prize. The book was also a winner of the Washington Arts Club National Award for arts writing and a New York Times “Notable Book” for 2008, and was named "Best Book of 2008" by a host of newspapers and magazines.
Her essays, articles and reviews have appeared regularly in national publications such as The American Scholar, New York Times Book Review, the Wall Street Journal and The Nation.
She is the editor of The Selected Poetry of John Greenleaf Whittier for the Library of America's American Poets Project and the anthology, Nineteenth-Century American Writers on Writing.