“The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley; or, Some Uses of Poetry in Revolutionary America”

A Talk by Distinguished Professor David Waldstreicher
(Ph.D. Program in History at the Graduate Center)

Tuesday, April 10, 2018
6:15 p.m. (approximately 1 hour)

The Graduate Center
Segal Theatre, First Floor
365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY

Reserve now (space is limited)
RSVP to Jim Cronin | jcronin@gc.cuny.edu | 212.817.7137
We will confirm your reservation.

David Waldstreicher, Distinguished Professor of History at the Graduate Center, will discuss his research for a biography of Phillis Wheatley (1753-84), the famous slave poet of the era of the American Revolution. Wheatley arrived enslaved in Boston in 1761. In 1773 she became one of the first women, and the first African American, to publish a book of poetry in the United States. Our talk will cover her remarkable achievements despite her difficult life.

Waldstreicher is a historian of early and nineteenth-century America, with interests spanning political history, cultural history, slavery and antislavery. He is author of Slavery’s Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification (2009); Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery and the American Revolution (2004); and In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776-1820 (1997). As editor, his books include most recently the two-volume Library of America edition of The Diaries of John Quincy Adams, 1779-1848 and John Quincy Adams and the Politics of Slavery: Selections from the Diary.

Waldstreicher is an elected member of the American Antiquarian Society and the recipient of awards and fellowships from the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, New York Public Library; the American Philosophical Society; and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, among others. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale.