Students enrolled in my spring graduate seminar on the Black Atlantic and Am Lit [pdf] are encouraged to read Davis’s Inhuman Bondage and Dubois’s Avengers of the New World over winter break. In mid-December I’ll email seminar members the syllabus, including a reading assignment for our first meeting.

Common-place, the online early American history magazine, has a special issue up on politics, just in time for the election. Stay tuned: Their spring issue (published in April 2009 and guest edited by Joanna Brooks, Eric Slauter, and myself) will find several fun ways to answer the question “Who Reads an Early American Book?”

I’ll be in Dresden this week (Oct. 7-10) for the biennial conference of the Charles Brockden Brown Society.

Word from editors at William and Mary Quarterly is that they plan to publish my essay “Elizabeth Whitman’s Disappearance and Her ‘Disappointment’” in their April 2009 issue.

New reviews of Republic of Intellect turn up in recent issues of Modern Intellectual History (by Ed Larkin, University of Delaware), Early American Literature (by Russ Castronovo, University of Wisconsin), and Eighteenth-Century Fiction (by Thomas Allen, University of Ottawa). I’m gratified by the overall favorable comments in each. Links above require institutional subscriptions of various sorts.

I’m pleased to find the Society of Early Americanists newsletter in today’s mail bearing the news that my essay “Elizabeth Whitman’s Disappearance and Her ‘Disappointment’” has won the Society’s Best Essay contest for 2007.

The April 2008 number of American Historical Review has a warm review of my book, Republic of Intellect, from Mark Longaker of UT-Austin. I’m pleased to learn the book is “charming,” even to a reader I’ve never met, and surprised that it ends with my “sour grapes” over the failure of a secular Enlightenment in the early United States. Tears for the infidels!

I have a brief piece titled “From Text/Context to ‘Situatedness’ in Atlantic History and Literature” in the new issue of Early American Literature. (The links require an institutional subscription through Project Muse.) The essay responds to Eric Slauter’s “History, Literature, and the Atlantic World,” which discusses what he sees as an unreciprocated familiarity, on the part of literary scholars, with work by their historian counterparts. The forum appears simultaneously in the current number of The William and Mary Quarterly.

“Writing Women, 1700-1800,” a symposium I’ve co-organized with my colleague Paula McDowell, features prominent scholars from across the U.S. and Canada. It will take place 10-11 April at NYU’s Fales Library and Special Collections.