Guest Lecture Jessica Conrad (Clayton State University)

“Imagining Other Worlds: Narrative as Protest”

How do we inspire change? How does literature allow us first to see and then to make the world anew? This presentation draws on Dr. Jessica Conrad’s Fulbright teaching and research project on American protest literature and culture. The presentation explores the ways narrative forms can envision changes to our world that challenge the status quo, inspiring activism in social and environmental justice. It examines utopian, dystopian, and revisionist narratives that imagine alternative pasts and futures, arguing that such texts contribute to, inspire, or theorize collective action in print. These other worlds posit new realities based in egalitarianism, accountability, and sustainability, offering a model for social and environmental justice. The project surveys key texts over the last two hundred years, including those by William Apess, Henry David Thoreau, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Octavia Butler among others, while drawing significant connections to current protest movements to illustrate the power of print in the pursuit of change. Drawing on print cultural theories of the socialization of texts and new social movement theories, the project aids scholarly understanding not only of protest literatures but of the movements from which they grow and the change they inspire.

Jessica Conrad (Ph.D. in English, 2019, University of Delaware) is Assistant Professor of English at Clayton State University where she teaches early American literature, with interests in women’s studies, African American literature, and print culture. Conrad’s scholarship deals with activist and reform literature. Conrad’s dissertation, titled “Boycott: Literary Interventions in the American Marketplace, 1820-1880,” traces the role of print culture in building, spreading, and sustaining consumer resistance movements, specifically in abolitionist boycotts, temperance, and thrift culture. Conrad’s work on nineteenth-century American reform literature is rooted in her larger interests in the power of literature to effect change. As a Fulbright-Botstiber Scholar at the University of Graz, she will advance her project, “Perspectives of American Protest Literature and Culture from Abroad,” which examines the long history of American social and environmental justice literature within an international lens. If “literature births activists,” as novelist and activist Angie Thomas has said, how does it do so? And what can a European perspective illuminate on the radical uses of print in shaping history?
Conrad’s scholarship has appeared in American Literature (vol. 90, no. 1), the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography (vol. 144, no. 3), and an edited volume of essays, Elusive Archives: Material Culture Studies in Formation (U Delaware Press, 2021). Conrad’s dissertation was awarded the Sypherd Prize for Outstanding Dissertation in the Humanities. Her research has been supported by a Fulbright-Bostiber grant, the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship in African American History at the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Haverford College Gest Fellowship, as well as various internal grants. Conrad has also received the Outstanding Composition Instructor Award (2019) at Kent State University and the Excellence in Graduate Teaching Award (2015) at the University of Delaware.

Poster