Thursday Night

Opening Reception: 4:30 at the American Philosophical Society, 427 Chestnut Street

Opening Plenary at the American Philosophical Society (5:30pm-7:30)

Chair: Kathleen M. Brown, Interim Director, McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania

Kerri K. Greenidge, Tufts University, author of The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in An American Family

Michiko Quinones, 1838 Black Metropolis

Dolly L. Marshall, Historian for the City of Camden and Preservationist of Mount Peace Cemetery – a National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom Site and Descendant of the Forten/Hegamin Families

Margaret Jerrido, Archivist, Mother Bethel AME Church

Judy Giesberg, Villanova University and author of Last Seen:The Enduring Search by Formerly Enslaved People to Find Their Lost Families

Friday

9 am at the American Philosophical Society, 427 Chestnut Street

Session 1: Black Arts and Letters. The Contributions of Women 9:00-10:30

Chair: Nancy Bentley, University of Pennsylvania, author of Frantic Panoramas: American Literature and Mass Culture

Maria Ryan, Florida State University, “Sarah Sanders’ Piano: Music in the Lives of the Women of the Stevens-Cogdell-Sanders-Venning Collection”

Melissa Flowers, University of Delaware, “Edmonia Lewis in Philadelphia: Black Travel and Networks of Affiliation”

Darby Witek, University of Delaware/American Antiquarian Society, “Copying that story of Mrs. H’s”: Reading Letitia Still, Caroline Anderson Still, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Black Philadelphia Women’s Work in Still’s Records

Nazera Sadiq Wright, University of Kentucky, “Frances E. W. Harper’s Library Card”

Session 2: Geography and Mobility 10:45-12:00

Chair: Kirsten Lee, Auburn University and 1838 Black Metropolis

Derrick R. Spires, Cornell University, “Tracking Jarena Lee’s Life, Narratives, and Pinky Ring”

Brigitte Fielder, University of Wisconsin-Madison, “On Riding (and Not Riding) the Cars in Philadelphia”

Jennifer Putzi, The College of William & Mary, “Geographical and Textual Space in the Diaries of Sallie Venning and Meta Vaux Warrick”

Julie Winch, University of Massachusetts, Boston, “Jesse Ewing Glasgow, Eloquent Exile”

Lunch Break 12:00-1:20pm

Session 3: Living in the City, 1:20-2:45

Chair: William Sturkey, University of Pennsylvania, author of Hattiesburg: An American City in Black and White

Joan Bryant, Syracuse University, “On the Edge of the North: Kinship and the Geography of Philadelphia Freedom”

Cameron Sauers, Penn State University, “Growing up on the Margins: Children of ‘the Shelter’ in Early Republican Philadelphia”

Hafeeza Anchrum, University of Pennsylvania, “Love, Loyalty, Labor & Life: The Women of Frederick Douglass Memorial Hospital and Nurse Training School”

Jessica Leigh Hester, Johns Hopkins University, “Petition as Protest: Families Confronting Grave Robbing Through the Black Press and Board of Health”

Session 4: Black Family Descendants, 2:55-4:00

Chair: Carla L. Peterson, Trustee, Library Company of Philadelphia, University of Maryland, and author of A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City

Joyce Mosley: Bustill Family

Carole Kirshner; Wood-Webb Family

Beverly Brown, Elsa Julien Lora: Stevens-Cogdell-Sanders-Venning Family

Session 5: Politics and Public History, Then and Now, 4:10-5:40

Chair: Anyabwile Love, Writer, Filmmaker and Black Studies professor, Community College of Philadelphia

Andrew Maginn, Sewanee: The University of the South, “Mapping Black French Philadelphia in the Age of Emancipation (1790-1890)“

Meagan Wierda, Université de Montréal, “The Measure of Citizenship: Antebellum Black Data Activists and the Fight Against Disenfranchisement in Pennsylvania”

Kelli Barnes, Independence National Historical Park, “The Fruits of a Long-Term Partnership: Co-Creating the (In)Visible Architects of Freedom: African Americans in Early Philadelphia Digital Archive”

Joi C. Weathers, Independent Writer, Literary Reading

Samantha de Vera, University of California, “The Colored Conventions and Philadelphia in the Classroom: New Approaches to Black History in the Age of AI”

Reception Friday Night 5:40pm at the American Philosophical Society

Saturday Morning

The American Philosophical Society, 427 Chestnut Street

Session 6: The Neighborhood, 9:00am-10:30am

Chair: Catherine Clinton, The University of Texas at San Antonio, author of Harriet Tubman, The Road to Freedom

Donna Rilling, State University of New York at Stony Brook, “West Philadelphia’s Black Women Property Owners and Clandestine Antislavery”

Jay Cephas, Princeton University, “Built with Their Own Hands: The Architecture of Black Self-Help in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia”

Jordan Alexander Stein, Fordham University, “Sex Work and the City”

Students Session: 10:45-11:15am:

Karen Falcon, Jubilee students and alumni in grades 5 through 9. These students have created their own publishing company called Jubilee Voices Publishing House

Closing Plenary 11:30-12:45: Where Do We Go from Here?

Chair: Kathleen M. Brown, Interim Director, McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, David Boies Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania, author of Undoing Slavery: Abolitionist Body Politics and the Argument over Humanity

Deirdre Cooper Owens, University of Connecticut and Former PAAH Director at LCP

Farah Jasmine Griffin, Columbia University

Vanessa Northington Gamble, MD/PhD, George Washington University

Morgan Lloyd, 1838 Black Metropolis