Dr. Martha Patterson Awarded Hutchins Family Fellowship at Harvard University for Spring 2025
Lebanon, IL (04/30/2024) — Dr. Martha Patterson, professor of English at McKendree University, was recently awarded a Hutchins Family Fellowship at Harvard University for the spring 2025 semester. She will be a scholar-in-residence at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard.
During this time, Dr. Patterson will work primarily on two projects. One project involves "The Chicago Black Renaissance, Monthly" book project, in which she plans to build on her previous work by revisiting the Chicago Black Renaissance from the 1930s-1950s from the perspective of the black female editors and writers who helped to shape it. Another project involves completing research for a book on how an evolving New Negro Woman emerges in the writing and under the editorship of Fern Gayden, Alice Browning, Eunice Johnson, and Era Bell Thompson.
Both Thompson and Gayden wrote autobiographies and held key editorial roles in Chicago's Black Renaissance periodicals: Negro Digest, Negro Story, and Ebony, respectively. Even as periodicals like the Chicago Defender, Negro Digest, Negro Story, Ebony, and Jet documented, to distinctly varying degrees, the brutal legacy of Chicago's segregation, Jim Crow violence, and the fight against it, Ebony, in particular, celebrated the joy, fashion, leisure, and success of the Black elite. Thompson's work in Ebony, meanwhile, fostered an international Pan-African consciousness both at odds and in tandem with the magazine's mission to celebrate the "zesty side of life." Together these publications affirmed Richard Wright and Gwendolyn Brooks as well as the gritty social realism of the Chicago school, while, at the same time, their celebrity and fashion coverage offered an escape from it.
"As I examine the archives of these key Chicago-based Black women writers and editors, along with the Ben Burns collection for material on Eunice Johnson, my goal is to trace a history of Black female networks in a male-dominated industry," Dr. Patterson said. "Building off the work of Brooks Hefner in Black Pulp, I also hope to gather research for a chapter on the rise of Black genre fiction in the Defender, Negro Digest, Negro Story, and Tan Confessions, all published in Chicago and offering alternative visions of Black life that countered the bleak brutality of Wright's best-selling Native Son and Black Boy. I plan to examine the popular periodical literature that most Black people during the time were reading and ask whether that that literature impels us to reconsider dominant interpretations of the Chicago Black Renaissance."
The Hutchins Center for African & African American Research supports work in the history and culture of people of African descent, providing a forum for collaboration and the ongoing exchange of ideas. Founded in 1975, the Hutchins Center is the preeminent research center in the field, sponsoring visiting fellows, publications, research projects and more initiatives that respond to and inspire interest in established and emerging channels of inquiry in Africa and its diasporas.
To learn more about the Hutchins Center, please click here.
