Mission Statement & Project Team

This exhibit was co-edited by Julia Creson and Madison Cramer. All exhibits were edited and
finalized by the co-editors. Both women also contributed their own projects and content to other
contributors’ projects in the development of the Black Women and the 1884 World’s Fair
exhibit.

We are graduate students in the English Master’s Program at Tulane University. This exhibit has developed as part of the Spring 2023 seminar on Black Women Writers of the Long 19th Century taught by Dr. Kate Adams. The Digital Humanities components of this course were supported by the Data Research Internship program led by intern, Madeline Nellis and Dr. Jacquelyne Thoni Howard.

Drawing from our study of Black women’s literature, Black literary history, and recovery scholarship, we have attempted to recover an untold part of the story of the Woman’s Department at the 1884 New Orleans World Fair and the “beautiful sisterhood of books” it included. Our focus is on women — particularly Black women — who were involved (or not involved) in the creation of exhibits. We do this work to draw attention to and challenge historical accounts of the 1884 Exposition and of the so-called canon of women’s literature. We use an open-source platform and the principles of Digital Humanities to make our work accessible and to invite collaboration.

We have approached this recovery of the exclusion of Black women from the Woman’s Department at the 1884 New Orleans World’s Fair through an anti-racist lens. However, because recovery work is inherently biased and we all identify as white, we acknowledge that there are likely to be some implicit biases shaping our work. As such, and because the project is partly speculative in design – imagining who might have exhibited or been inspired by exhibits, had the Woman’s Department integrated contributions from Black women – we hope future scholars will work with the texts and information we’ve assembled, and add more materials to provide a further nuanced understanding of the 1884 New Orleans World’s Fair and its racial politics.

We hope this project will be used for educational and scholarly purposes, and that our research will provide a foundation for more knowledge creation, conversations, papers, books, and discussions around early Black women writers. We would love to see the work taken further by scholars and experts, beyond what nine white graduate students could accomplish in one semester. 

Project Team