Acclaimed scholar to help celebrate 50 years of American Studies

Author and American studies scholar Mary Helen Washington will help Skidmore celebrate the 50th anniversary of its American Studies Department when she visits the campus Friday, Sept. 28.

Washington, professor of English at the University of Maryland at College Park and former president of the national American Studies Association, will participate in morning classes. At 5:15 p.m. in Gannett Auditorium, she will give a public lecture in which she will discuss her forthcoming book, African American Writers and the Cold War.  A reception will follow.  Admission is free.

Washington is the author or editor of three books: Memory of Kin: Stories About Family by Black Writers (1991, Doubleday), Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women, 1860-1960 (1987, Doubleday) and Black-Eyed Susans and Midnight Birds: Stories by and About Black Women (1990, Doubleday). She “has had a greater impact upon the formation of the canon of Afro-American literature than has any other scholar," according to The New York Times Book Review.

The Christian Science Monitor called Washington “a driving force in resurrecting the work of black women writers.” Invented Lives, the paper noted, “contains an astonishing scope of lives:  from Harriet Jacobs’s slave narrative; to Nella Larsen’s teacher, who feels stifled by the black bourgeoisie; to Gwendolyn Brooks’s Maud Martha, musing confidently that her beau will marry her even if she is plain.” Invented Lives was a New York Times “notable book” of 1987.

In addition to her books, Washington is the author of more than 32 articles and reviews in a host of academic and popular publications.

Her fellowships and prizes include the Lyndehurst Prize, 1994-96, the 1988 Chancellor’s Distinguished Scholarship Award from the University of Massachusetts, the Zora Neale Hurston Creative Scholarship Award (1986), a research fellowship from the Wellesley Center for Research on Women (1982) and the Mary Ingraham Bunting Fellowship from Harvard (1979-80).  She also is the recipient of several honorary degrees.

Skidmore first offered a major in American studies in 1957.  The American Studies Department was formally launched in 1967. The American Studies major is one that focuses upon life and culture in the United States, past and present, drawing upon a variety of disciplines for resources, techniques, and approaches.