UNE’s Jennifer Tuttle presents at humanities conference in California

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, recently presented her research at the C19: Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists Conference in Pasadena, California, on March 15.

Her paper, “Newsprint: Lost Fiction from Black LA,” was presented as part of a panel on “Lost Things.” Tuttle discussed two 1914 stories published by Dora L. Mitchell in the Los Angeles Times Illustrated Weekly Magazine, which was tucked into the newspaper on weekends. 

Because the Weekly was not microfilmed with the rest of the Times in the 1940s, it is missing from research databases widely in use today, which rely on the microfilm. That, Tuttle explained, is merely one of a cascading series of losses that has led to these stories being missing from the historical record.

While the material loss of the texts themselves illuminates the fragility of print history, Tuttle argued, the fact of their loss forces the question of how to grapple with archival absences and what it means to recover Black women’s writing in California from these early years. Mitchell published these stories under the pen name she used for racial passing, in a venue that the Times itself recently admitted overtly advocated white supremacy. 

Tuttle concluded that, although missing, Mitchell’s stories in the Weekly can help the researcher piece together a larger picture of Mitchell's protean authorship and scrappy politics. They also upend critical expectations about where and how to look for Black women’s texts, Tuttle said.