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Our speaker writes:

In this talk, drawn from my recent monograph, Selling Antislavery: Abolition and Mass Media in Antebellum America, I discuss the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS) as a media, not just reform, organization. I show how its foundational text—the “Catalogue of Publications” of antislavery works for sale at its offices and depositories—names and shapes the movement’s larger institutional forms and practices. The catalogue reflects not only the multimodal nature of the AASS’s media campaign—its circulation of print, material, as well as visual items—but also its linking of form and format. Antislavery understood its media as at once persuasive arguments and marketable commodities. By providing readings of several antislavery texts/objects, I parse how the AASS produced one of the antebellum era’s first mass media by synergizing its discursive, material, and distributional modes.

About our speaker:

Teresa A. Goddu is Associate Professor of English and American Studies at Vanderbilt University where she also serves as Faculty Head of E. Bronson Ingram College. A specialist in nineteenth-century American literature and culture, her research focuses on slavery and antislavery, race and American culture, the history of the book, genre studies, as well as print, material, and visual culture. She is the author of Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation (Columbia University Press) and, more recently, Selling Antislavery: Abolition and Mass Media in Antebellum America (University of Pennsylvania Press). She is the recipient of two grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar, and a Senior Specialist Fulbright award.