Myers, Elissa
Title(s):
PhD Candidate, Adjunct Instructor
Email:
Elissam1330@gmail.com
Institutional Affiliations: CUNY Graduate Center, Queens College
Research Interests: Children's & Young Adult Literature, Digital Humanities, Material Culture, Nineteenth-Century Women Writers, Periodicals
My research and teaching interests are in nineteenth-century women authors, children’s literature, juvenilia and texts written by children, periodicals, needlework and other craft forms, and material culture. My most recently taught courses include a Literary History class entitled “Women’s Literary Traditions,” a Writing about Literature (English 130) class themed “The Gothic,” and a Literature and Place class themed “Global Victorians.”
My dissertation, Crafting Nineteenth-Century Girlhoods, examines nineteenth-century educational crafting in charity schools, mission schools, and boarding schools in Britain and America. I argue that crafting in these schools often aimed to rigidly structure girls’ outer lives in order to eradicate their inner lives and cultural and religious identities. I will examine girls’ work in craft forms and representations of crafts in literature–including needlework samplers and manuscript and printed periodicals—in order to assess how girls might have used these very craft forms to resist such oppressive pedagogical techniques.
