Lois A. Brown

Associate Professor of English
Director of the Weissman Center for Leadership and the Liberal Arts  2005-2009

Specialization
American literature; African American literature and culture; New England literary culture and history; poetry; memoir and biography; women’s writing

Lois Brown joined the Department of English at Mount Holyoke College in 1998.  Currently, she is the Director of the Weissman Center for Leadership and the Liberal Arts at Mount Holyoke College, a center dedicated to creating invigorating public programs, supporting the leadership potential of students, and creating events that allow dynamic and productive consideration of vital contemporary issues and significant historical questions.   A recipient in 2004 of one of the college’s two Distinguished Teaching Awards awarded that year, she also was a Baccalaureate speaker in 2004 and delivered the faculty address at the 2002 Convocation.

Brown's research and teaching focuses on nineteenth-century African American and American literature and culture, abolitionist narratives, and evangelical juvenilia. She has held research fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University. A 2000 Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Award recipient, she has been affiliated with the Harvard University Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research where she also has been a visiting fellow. Brown has lectured widely and published articles on African American literature, women's writing, early American education, and African American history and religion. In 2001, the Museum of Afro-American History in Boston recognized her work with one of its first African American History Awards and lauded her for her "extraordinary commitment to American history" and her "obvious commitment to education and equality."

Brown’s biography, Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins: Black Daughter of the Revolution, published by the University of North Carolina Press in June 2008, has been hailed as “the definitive Hopkins biography for decades to come.” Distinguished scholar Carla Peterson describes the work as “a truly astonishing piece of scholarship” in which “[t]he research is prodigious, the material truly compelling, the writing clear and articulate.” “Brown's approach to Hopkins's oeuvre through the lens of family genealogy and ancestral legacy,” writes Peterson, “allows for a seamless interweaving of life and letters which works amazingly well.”  

Brown’s edition of Susan Paul’s Memoir of James Jackson, The Attentive and Obedient Scholar (1835) was published by Harvard University Press in 2000. This volume is the earliest known work of African American biography and the first published prose narrative by a black woman in the United States. Originally written by Susan Paul, an African American schoolteacher, the book had languished in obscurity until Brown stumbled upon a mention of it while pursuing her research on novelist and playwright Pauline Hopkins. The memoir chronicles the brief life of a freeborn black child in Boston, and sheds new light on the spiritual and political education of African American children in the antebellum North. She also is the author of The Literary Harlem Renaissance, an encyclopedia of the period published by Facts on File in 2005.

Her passion for African American history has led to successful curatorial experiences that have included exhibitions at the Museum of Afro-American History in Boston and at the Boston Public Library. Since 2003, she has curated and co-curated five exhibitions: Black Books: The First African-American Authors for the Museum of African American History and the Boston Public Library in 2003; Lessons from the Past: Revisiting the Abiel Smith School, 1835 - 1855 at the Museum of Afro-American History in 2005; two major exhibitions honoring William Lloyd Garrison: Words of Thunder: William Lloyd Garrison and the Ambassadors of Abolition and of Words of Thunder: The Life and Times of William Lloyd Garrison in 2005 funded by a $500,000 grant from the IMLS. Both Garrison exhibitions opened in August 2005 on Boston's Beacon Hill at the Museum of Afro-American and in Copley Square at the Boston Public Library and drew more than 12,000 visitors. A Gathering Place for Freedom which opened in December 2007, commemorates the bicentennial of the African Meeting House in Boston, the oldest extant church building in the United States and a site of formative abolitionist, cultural, educational, and political gatherings.

Selected Publications

Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins: Black Daughter of the Revolution (2008)

The Harlem Literary Encyclopedia (2005)

Memoir of James Jackson, The Attentive and Obedient Scholar (2002)

“William Lloyd Garrison and Emancipatory Feminism in Nineteenth-Century America,” in Garrison at 200: History, Memory and Legacy.  Forthcoming, Yale University Press, Summer 2008.

“’She was led to hope for a better country’: Obituaries of African Women in New England, 1821-1831.”  Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers, Fall 2003.

“Out of the Mouths Of Babes: The Abolitionist Campaigns of Susan Paul and the Juvenile Choir of Boston.”  The New England Quarterly, March 2002.

News Links:

"A Man Ahead of His Time: William Lloyd Garrison Bicentennial Celebration," Boston Globe, August 8, 2005

"New Directions for Weissman Center A Q&A with Lois Brown," College Street Journal, March 11, 2005

"Five MHC Professors Garner Teaching and Scholarship Awards," College Street Journal, April 30, 2004

"MHC Professor Rediscovers Biography of Nineteenth-Century African American Boy," College Street Journal, April 28, 2000

"'Let the Good Work Go On'--Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins: Black Daughter of the Revolution," review by Andreá N. Williams, Women's Review of Books, May/June 2009, Wellesley Centers for Women