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Biddeford, Maine

Jennifer Tuttle publishes paper on women's literary recovery

Jennifer Tuttle, Dorothy M. Healy Professor of Literature and Health and professor of English
Jennifer Tuttle, Ph.D., Dorothy M. Healy Professor of Literature and Health
Read the full essay in Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature

Jennifer Tuttle, Ph.D., Dorothy M. Healy Professor of Literature and Health in the University of New England School of Arts and Humanities and 2021-2022 Ludcke Chair of Liberal Arts and Sciences, has published a peer-reviewed essay titled “Recollecting Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Archival Labor and Women's Literary Recovery.”

The essay appeared in Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature in the second of two special issues on “Women and Archives” (vol. 40, no. 2, fall 2021).

Tuttle's essay began as the 2015 keynote address for the Sixth International Charlotte Perkins Gilman Conference at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University on the theme of Gilman and the Archive. In the essay, Tuttle analyzes the acquisition of the Charlotte Perkins Gilman Papers by the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at Radcliffe.

Although the prevailing conception of women's literary recovery — the laborious process of finding and studying women's writing that has been lost, obscured, or deliberately ignored — tends to focus only on scholars’ acts of discovery while conducting archival research, Tuttle draws on the Schlesinger Library's institutional records to challenge this view. Using the Gilman Papers as a case study, she posits instead that recovery is a recollective process in which archivists play a formative role as equals and partners of scholars in the reconstruction of historical memory.

About the University of New England

The University of New England is Maine’s largest independent university, with two beautiful coastal campuses in Maine, a one-of-a-kind study abroad campus in Tangier, Morocco, and an array of flexible, accredited online degrees. In an uncommonly welcoming and supportive community, we offer hands-on learning, empowering students to make a positive impact in a world full of challenges. The state’s top provider of health professionals, we are home to Maine’s only medical college, Maine’s only dental college, a variety of other interprofessionally aligned health care degree programs, as well as nationally recognized programs for marine science degrees, natural and social sciences degrees, arts and humanities degrees, and business degrees.