SEA Featured Scholar, December 2024: Travis Foster
How did you become interested in studying early American literature?
I entered graduate school planning to study American modernism and, specifically, Willa Cather. Interest in Willa Cather led me back in time to Sarah Orne Jewett, and that initial jump back in time acquired a momentum of its own. I never looked back, or maybe I never stopped looking back. My research from then on has been situated mostly squarely in the nineteenth century, but my teaching frequently shifts earlier.
Who is your favorite early American writer, or what is your favorite early American text, and why?
I don’t have an overall favorite, but the early American writers I most enjoy discussing with students are Anne Bradstreet and Phillis Wheatley Peters. Both have sparked some of the most engaging class discussions I’ve experienced and have helped students learn by doing the lesson that literary interpretation produces new knowledge. As for a favorite scholarly text, I love assigning Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History because it consistently generates more “aha” moments in a 75-minute class than almost any other work I’ve taught.
What are you currently working on?
I’m writing a literary and cultural history about trans feminine childhood from the 1830s through the 1910s. I’m trying to show how trans misogyny developed as a tool for maintaining racial hierarchy by regulating gender among whites, children most especially.
What is something you are reading right now (EAL related or otherwise) that inspires you, either personally or professionally?
Last spring I finally—finally!—got around to reading Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation, about historical links between the devaluation of women and the expropriation of labor. The way it brings together all these patterns I’d known to exist but hadn’t quite known how to describe or how to connect – I just loved it.
Is there a scholar in the field who inspires you, and why?
Mostly, I’m inspired by scholars who model generosity and work to make opportunities for others’ ideas and work. I just finished two years serving on the C19 Executive Committee, and I was frequently in awe of my fellow committee members, who provided many models for doing right by the field and by other scholars. I’m also inspired by scholars doing work on trans history in the early and nineteenth-century Americas, who are developing new methods of historiography and reading.
Travis Foster is Academic Director of Gender and Women’s Studies and Associate Professor of English, Villanova University.