About
Affiliations: Department of Afroamerican and African Studies Department of English Language and Literature Department of Classical Studies
Heidi Morse specializes in 19th century African American literary and cultural studies. Since joining the University of Michigan as a 2014-16 Du Bois-Mandela-Rodney postdoctoral fellow, she has taught several courses including a popular first-year seminar titled “Black Women, Black Arts” and upper-level courses on poetry, 19th century black women’s activism, the black Atlantic, and the role of art in social protest movements from abolitionism to #BlackLivesMatter. Her current book project, Teaching and Testifying: 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 won the Rhetoric Society of America’s Dissertation Award in 2015, and her articles have appeared or are forthcoming 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 (forthcoming from Oxford University Press, Fall 2018).
Fields of study:
- 19th century African American studies
- U.S. women’s literature and activism
- Poetry and print culture
- Classical reception studies
