Staking a Claim; Launching a New Career

Re-reading my 2009 article published in American Periodicalsprovided a reminder of the trajectory of my academic career, a trajectory far from typical, I think. I earned my B.A. in English from Miami University in 1979, graduating Phi Beta Kappa with Honors, after completing and defending a fifty-plus page thesis on the function of the epilogue in Shakespeare’s Henry Vand Pericles. Encouraged by my then-mentor, Alice Fox, I applied to the Ph.D. program at Tulane University, but by the time I arrived, the Shakespeareans in the department had departed over (as I understand the academic gossip) the issue of Tulane’s investment in adding sports teams. I floundered for two years trying to find a new dissertation topic, and, unsatisfied with the choices that seemed do-able with the remaining faculty, I completed the requirements for the M.A. and took what I thought might be just a year or so off to regroup. That year off stretched into more than fifteen years while I moved through three other professions: newspaper reporter, medical office manager, and fitness consultant.

When I applied to the newly-created PhD program in Cultural Studies at George Mason University in 1998, I was forty years old, married, in the process of raising two tween-age daughters, and busy travelling across the U.S. and Europe on weekends as a fitness educator—designing and presenting continuing education workshops at industry conferences. So much had changed, both in my own life and in the academy in those intervening years, that I never once considered returning to my earlier interest in Shakespeare. Instead, fascinated to learn that well-known nineteenth-century writer Caroline M. Kirkland had also edited a magazine, the Union(later Sartain’s Union Magazine), I began expanding seminar papers on Kirkland’s editorship of this magazine into a dissertation project that examined the engraved matter published in the Unionand four of its Philadelphia competitors, Godey’s Lady’s Book, Graham’s Magazine, Peterson’s, and Miss Leslie’s. Supervised by an historian, an art historian, and a cultural historian, my dissertation quickly moved beyond a strictly literary reading of these magazines and, just as quickly, moved beyond a content analysis of the engraved matter that served as the anchor for these magazines of art and literature.

At that time, digital access to these magazines was limited to the Pro-Quest American Periodicals Series (APS) Online, and the magazines had been digitized from microfilm versions, so the engraved matter was generally too dark to distinguish subject matter from the digitized copies alone. The poor quality of the engraved matter on microfilm drove me to the archives. Thanks to financial support from the Smithsonian, the American Antiquarian Society, and Winterthur, I read, photographed, scanned, and entered into a searchable database the contents of these five magazines for the decade 1840–50. In the process, I became aware of what the great magazine scholar, Frank Luther Mott, had noted about these engravings, but to whom few had paid much attention—in his extended sketch of Godey’s Lady’s Book, Mott wrote, “Do not call them illustrations. They did not illustrate the text; the text illustrated them.” ¹

I spent two summers after landing my tenure-track job at the University of South Florida’s Lakeland campus house-sitting for friends in the north in order to gain additional access to materials at the Library Company of Philadelphia (LCP) and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania (HSP). At HSP, I discovered the treasure trove of letters exchanged between authors, editors, and publishers of these magazines. These materials supplemented the letters from artists and engravers I had already mined at the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art (AAA). From these materials, I developed the major argument that grounded the article published in American Periodicals. Quoting from that piece:

I will argue that illustrating an engraving served as one nexus in a complex web of literary sociability and exchange that also included...