On Biography and Memory: A Juneteenth Conversation with Tara Bynum and Cornelia Dayton

In commemoration of Juneteenth 2022, join us for a virtual discussion with Tara Bynum and Cornelia Dayton on the work that goes into recovering historic African American lives and experiences, and a reflection on our reasons for undertaking this work.

Scholars have displayed remarkable creativity in uncovering the lives of eighteenth-century African Americans, revisiting and rereading the archives to find out more about women and men often obscured in the historical record. Dayton’s work, for example, has recently uncovered in county-level legal papers the back story of John Peters, husband of poet Phillis Wheatley, and what transpired when they left Boston for three years. Bynum’s rich ongoing study of ordinary account books, meeting minutes, pamphlets, and private correspondence continually reminds us of the extent that people, free and enslaved, did not exist on their own, but lived and moved within communities.  

As this work provides new understandings of freedom and race which complicate what we think we know about the individual lives of people of color, it also raises important questions about how historical figures want to be remembered and what it means for us to remember them today. 

The event will take place on Friday, June 17 at 1:00 p.m. ET via Zoom. The event is free of charge, but registration is required to attend.

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Tara Bynum is an Assistant Professor of English & African American Studies at University of Iowa and a scholar of early African American literary histories before 1800. Her current monograph, Reading Pleasures (November 2022), examines the ways in which eighteenth-century enslaved and/or free men and women feel good or experience pleasure in spite of the privations of slavery, “unfreedom,” or white supremacy.

Cornelia H. Dayton teaches history at the University of Connecticut. For her new findings on Phillis Wheatley, see her Sept. 2022 article in the New England Quarterly, “Lost Years Recovered: John Peters and Phillis Wheatley Peters in Middleton.” An accompanying website, The Wheatley Peters Project, will launch this summer.