M. Lynn Weiss

Despite the recent trend in American scholarship emphasizing the transnational and cross-cultural dimensions of American culture, Victor Séjour is rarely mentioned. Elèna Mortara’s Writing For Justice: Victor Séjour, the Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara in the Age of Transatlantic Emancipations addresses this gap.

M. Lynn Weiss, associate professor of English and American Studies at William & Mary, conducts at 2014 interview with Adrienne Kennedy, one of the most prominent voices of African-American theater.

Greenspan’s biography provides early 21st-century readers with a thick description of the social, political and cultural climate of the disparate but intimately connected contexts of Brown’s life. More than a time-line, Greenspan’s contextualization calls attention to the cataclysmic events taking place in the world of the renowned abolitionist and writer.

“Harlem Nocturne” departs from conventional narratives of great artists by insisting that the cultural and political currents of their time encouraged and enriched their creativity. New York City, the people and places that made it a progressive, dynamic site for political and cultural expression during the 1940s made it possible for three young black women artists to imagine themselves as “makers and doers” of the essential social, political and aesthetic work of their time.