Mondays at Beinecke: The Black Condemned: Sketches of the Life of Joseph Mountain…Executed at New Haven in the Era of Gallows Literature with Patricia Lott

Zoom webinar registration: https://bit.ly/47M1QL8

Dr. Patricia Ann Lott will discuss the story of Joseph Mountain, executed in New Haven in 1790, and the text published at the time of his execution, “Sketches of the Life of Joseph Mountain …”

Lott is an Associate Professor of English, African American and Africana Studies, and American Studies at Ursinus College where she teaches courses on African American literature, orature, and performance. Her research interrogates the problems of racial slavery, incomplete emancipation, and unfinished abolition in the late-eighteenth through turn-of-the-twentieth century North as discerned in the region’s laws and its literary, oratorial, performance, and visual cultures. Her book-in-progress, titled Memory’s Ruins: Slavery, Commemoration, and Wastecraft in the Nineteenth-Century U.S. North, is an interdisciplinary investigation into the incomplete suppression of the U.S. North’s slavery past. It focuses on the protracted struggle between two irreconcilable tendencies among the region’s late-eighteenth and nineteenth-century publics: to discard or to preserve the collective memory of racial bondage.

Mondays at Beinecke online talks focus on materials from the collections and include an opening presentation at 4pm followed by conversation and question and answer beginning about 4:30pm until 5pm.