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History professor awarded summer research
stipend
Andrea Flood ‘03
The National Endowment for the Arts has
just awarded Professor Catherine Kerrison of the history department a
$5,000 summer research stipend to help fund her project titled, “Race,
reading and writing in the early American South: 1700-1810.”
Kerrison’s research for this project will help complete her current
scholarship for her book, titled A Word of Advice: Books, Behavior and
Feminine Identity in the 18th Century South. This work focuses on an analysis
of advice literature for females in the last quarter of the 17th century
and the early 18th century. In the early chapters of this work Kerrison
discusses the thematic structures of these books intended as conduct guides
for females. In the final chapter, whose writing will be funded by the
research stipend, Kerrison asks, “What is peculiar or different
about the way women in the slave South understand the lessons of what
they read?” This chapter focuses on differing female responses and
understandings to these writings, based on either a northern or southern
perspective.
“I am convinced the reason women in the south understand what they
read differently is because of the hierarchical nature of a society that
must be strictly maintained to keep slavery in control,” she explained.
Her work discusses how this rigidly stratified system was maintained,
even while women in the north were becoming exposed to increasingly liberating
ideals. In order for powerful white males to preserve the prevalent racial
boundaries of southern plantations and society, similar gender distinctions
must also be maintained. Kerrison’s research focuses on the reasons
why women understand these issues differently.
Kerrison became an assistant professor at Villanova in the fall of 1999.
She received her bachelor’s degree in 1975 from Seton Hall University,
and master’s and doctorate degrees in 1994 and 1999 from the College
of William and Mary.
At the University she teaches courses on Colonial America, Revolutionary
and Federalist America and the changing roles of women in American society.
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