NCID-1078
Heidi Morse
Lecturer I in English Language and Literature, Lecturer I in Afroamerican and African Studies and Lecturer I in Classical Studies, College of Literature, Science, and the Arts
University of Michigan
Education/Degree:
1 Literature (University of California, Santa Cruz)
About
Heidi Morse specializes in 19th century African American literary and cultural studies, with a particular focus on women's poetry, rhetoric, and activism. After receiving her PhD in literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz, she won the Rhetoric Society of America?s Dissertation Award in 2015. She was a 2014-16 Du Bois-Mandela-Rodney postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan. She teaches on topics including African American poetry, 19th century women's activism, the black Atlantic, and the role of art in social pro, movements from abolitionism to #BlackLivesMatter. Her articles have appeared in Comparative Literature, Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to World Literature, and Oxford Bibliographies in African American Studies. She is co-editor, with Ian Moyer and Adam Lecznar, of Classicisms in the Black Atlantic (Oxford University Press, 2020).
Current Work
Heidi Morse’s book-in-progress, Teaching and ,ifying: Black Women’s American Classicism, narrates the hidden history of 19th century black women’s adaptations of classical Greek and Roman literature, art, and rhetoric in the pursuit of racial justice. She argues that women ranging from the antislavery activist Sojourner Truth to the Latin teacher Anna Julia Cooper altered the trajectory of American classicism from an exclusionary legacy re-inscribing “whiteness” into a protean set of cultural adaptations that could be mobilized in support of racial equality.
Research Area Keyword(s)
African American literature, classical receptions, poetry, rhetoric, womens activism