Eric Gardner
Professor of English Appointed to SVSU in 1996
Ph.D. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
A.M. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
B.A. Illinois Wesleyan University
ARTICLES
"Josephine Bruce," "Walter M. Burton," "Dennis Carter," "Jennie Carter," "Peter Cassey," "Joseph Carter Corbin," "Thomas Detter," "Moses Dickson," "Grace Bustill Douglass," "Kate Drumgoold," "Edward Park Duplex," "Barney Fletcher," "Mary Weston Fordham," "James E. M. Gilliard," "Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield," "William H. Hall," "James H. Hubbard," "Amelia E. Johnson," "Harvey Johnson," "Millie and Christine McKoy," "John J. Moore," "Gertrude E. H. Bustill Mossell," "George Washington Offley," "Allen Parker," "Susan Paul," "Frederika D. S. Perry," "John S. Rock," "George T. Ruby," "Chloe Russel," "Harriet Scott," "Marie Selika," "Rosetta Douglass Sprague," "Jonas H. Townsend," "Susan Paul Vashon," "T. M. D. Ward," "Frank J. Webb," "Mary Webb," "James Williams," and "William H. Yates." In the African American National Biography, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, 2: 26-28, 2: 83-84, 2: 186, 2: 191-192, 2: 210-211, 2: 427-428, 2: 659-660, 2: 676-677, 3: 49-50, 3: 69-70, 3: 109-110, 3: 293-294, 3: 320-321, 3: 509, 3: 625-627, 3: 625-627, 4: 24, 4: 347-348, 4: 547-548, 4: 576-577, 5: 530-531, 5: 677-678, 6: 55-57, 6: 180, 6: 235-236, 6: 280-281, 6: 308-309, 6: 665-666, 7: 23-24, 7: 40-41, 7: 106-107, 7: 139-140, 7:360-361, 7: 625-626, 8: 24-26, 8: 107-108, 8: 184-186, 8: 471-472, 8: 325-326, and 8: 471-472. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
These 39 entries provide definitive and often new biographical information on African American activists, artists, and authors.
"Two Texts on Children and Christian Education by Maria W. Stewart." PMLA (Publications of the Modern Languages Association) 123.1 (January 2008): 156-165.
This piece shares two (re)discovered texts written in the early 1860s by Black activist Maria W. Stewart (1803-1879) as well as critical analysis of the texts and newly discovered biographical information on Stewart. In addition to this vital information on Stewart's mid-life work, I provide one of the first scholarly discussions of the periodical that published the texts, the African Methodist Episcopal Church's Repository of Religion and Literature (based in Indianapolis and, later, Baltimore).
PAPERS AND PRESENTATIONS
"Letters from Japan: Peter K. Cole, Japan, and the Black ‘West' During Reconstruction." Annual conference of the Western Literature Association, Boulder, Colorado, October 2008.
This paper examines a set of letters Black expatriate Peter K. Cole wrote to the San Francisco Elevator from his new home in Japan in the late 1860s and early 1870s. In addition to providing newly discovered biographical and contextual information on Cole, it places his representations of Japanese culture and politics in dialogue with conceptions of "Black Orientalism" and African American battles for suffrage and civil rights after the Civil War.
"Redefining Nineteenth-Century San Francisco: Jennie Carter, the Elevator Group, and Black Literature." Annual conference of the American Literature Association, San Francisco, California, May 2008.
The research that produced this paper both continues the discussions of Carter and the Black West begun in my 2007 book Jennie Carter: A Black Journalist of the Early West and broadens that work to consider the ways in which the community of Black writers surrounding the San Francisco Elevator attempted to define a Reconstruction-era sense of African American literature in the West
GRANT
"Unexpected Places: Relocating Nineteenth-Century African American Literature." Ruth and Ted Braun Fellowship, Saginaw Community Foundation. $37,500. January 2008 to December 2010.
This grant will support intensive research on a range of African American writers, editors, and publishers of the nineteenth century who lived outside of the urban Northeast and who have been left off most maps of African American literary and cultural history.