Virginia Humanities

Two Weeks Before or 150 Years Later: The 15th Amendment

With just two weeks to go before U.S. voters head to the polls again, Virginia Humanities Residential Fellow Don DeBats, head of the American Studies department at Flinders University and a history and politics scholar, takes to the podium to talk about his latest foray into digital humanities work. DeBats is researching the individual voting […]

On the Tracks

The African American Women of Gordonsville and the Train “On the Tracks” is part of the book manuscript Riding Jane Crow: African American Women and the American Railroad, a social and literary history of nineteenth and early twentieth-century black female train travel. Although the railroad was one of the most significant forms of transportation in […]

Virginia Suite: Narrative Poems

Virginia Humanities Fellow Brenda Marie Osbey Presents “Virginia Suite: Narrative Poems” “Virginia Suite” is a historical narrative poem sequence that focuses on interactions of Europeans, Native Americans, and Africans in the earliest years of the Virginia Colony. Part of a larger project, it examines the place of Virginia in the exploration, settlement, and shaping of […]

Book Launch: Chesapeake Requiem

Norfolk | Richmond | DC

Described as “a brilliant, soulful, and timely portrait of a two-hundred-year-old crabbing community  in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay as it faces extinction,” Chesapeake Requiem: A Year with the Watermen of Vanishing Tangier Island is the culmination of Earl Swift’s longtime fellowship at Virginia Humanities.

Uncovering the Story of an Enslaved Woman at Lumpkin’s Jail

Virginia Humanities Fellow Kristen Green is working on a book that will tell the story of Mary Lumpkin, an enslaved woman who is believed to have given birth to at least five children fathered by Robert Lumpkin.

Ballad Keepers of Appalachia’s Musical Crossroads

The author of African Banjo Echoes in Appalachia, a cultural history of the gourd “banjar” and later American five-string banjo in the South, Virginia Humanities Fellow Cece Conway will discuss her current book project and how she traces the earlier musical history of the ballad singing genre, the arrival of the fiddle and its influence upon […]

Making the Digital Physical

Exhibit by Virginia Humanities Fellow tells the story of early online publishing

In 1996, Virginia Humanities Fellow Katherine McNamara started one of the earliest online literary journals, Archipelago. She recently partnered with UVA’s Rare Book School to produce an exhibit —  An Archipelago of Readers: Forming a Literary Culture in Digital Media — that tells the story of this pioneering digital publication.

An Archipelago of Readers

Forming a Literary Culture in Digital Media What did it mean to found a literary journal on the web at the dawn of online publishing? And what kinds of archives and physical objects tell the story of digital publishing? Join VFH Fellow Katherine McNamara for a discussion of the Rare Book School’s exhibition in the […]

We Face the Dawn

We Face the Dawn: Oliver Hill, Spottswood Robinson, and the Legal Team That Dismantled Jim Crow

Join VFH Fellow, author, and retired journalist Margaret Edds for a public presentation about her latest book, We Face the Dawn, which offers the first comprehensive account of the South’s most significant grassroots legal team and how it successfully challenged racial separation in the 1940s and 1950s.