Eminent
Scholar
Martha Vicinus, Eliza M. Mosher Distinguished
University Professor, holds appointments in English, Women’s
Studies and History at the University of Michigan, Ann
Arbor. She is the author and editor of eleven books, including
Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women,
1850-1920 (1985), Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay
and Lesbian Past (1989), co-edited with Martin Duberman
and George Chauncey, Jr., and Lesbian Subjects: A Feminist
Studies Reader (1996), as well as numerous articles on
Victorian popular culture, the history of sexuality, and
Victorian women. She has held fellowships at the Humanities
Research Centre (Australia) and the National Humanities
Center, as well as a Guggenheim, ACLS, Senior NEH, and
other smaller grants. She directed two NEH Summer Seminars
in 1992 and 1996. In 2004 she published Intimate Friends:
Women who Loved Women, 1778-1928. She has researched and
written on cross-dressing on and off the stage, lesbian
recuperations of theatrical transvestites, fin-de-siècle
women writers, and the transition from Victorianism to
Modernism. As Director of the Sweetland Writing Center,
she organized the Center’s first international conference, “Originality,
Imitation and Plagiarism: A Cross-Disciplinary Conference
on Writing,” held in September 2005. A selection
of papers from this conference, co-edited with Caroline
Eisner, is forthcoming in 2007. Her current research focuses
on a book tentatively titled Cosmopolitan Women, 1880-1930,
an examination of six Anglo-American women writers who
lived in France or Italy, and participated in the aesthetic
movement and avant-garde circles, but lived to see their
ideas and work superseded by Modernism. Each took strong
and differing public positions on the Dreyfus Affair, World
War I and suffrage.
Professor Vicinus will particpate in several classes for
the departments of English, History and Women's Studies
and will also give a lecture open to the general public
during her visit from February 26- March 2, 2007. For more
information on event time and date please contact Dr. Julie
Early, UAH English department at 824-2375 or email earlyj@uah.edu.
