Prestige, Perpetuity, and Progress: Understanding the James Weldon Johnson Collection’s Early Gift Economy
March 14, 2024
Start time: 12:00 p.m.
End time: 1:00 p.m
Location: Valentine House, Room 201 (920 W Franklin St, Richmond, VA)
In 1941, writer and arts patron Carl Van Vechten founded the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection at Yale University, but this archive’s actual growth depended upon the generosity of many collectors, writers, and artists. In my talk, I use Carl Van Vechten’s and New York City schoolteacher Dorothy Peterson’s correspondence to explore items donated and values exchanged in what I am calling an early gift economy. I demonstrate how these webbed connections anticipated and informed the intellectual genealogies that would merge over the next two decades between historically Black and predominately White educational institutions.
About the Speaker
Dr. Melanie Chambliss is a current ACLS postdoctoral fellow in residence at the Humanities Research Center. During her residency, Dr. Chambliss is completing her book manuscript History in the Making: Black Archives, Black Liberation, and the Remaking of Modernity (under contract with the University of Pennsylvania Press). History in the Making examines how institutionalized Black archives helped to forge and fracture historical authority during the early twentieth century. Her book argues that Black archives functioned as sites of intellectual self-determination because they provided both resources and frameworks to challenge White supremacy as the organizing principle of the modern world. These collections offered accessible evidence of Black accomplishment and humanity, and researchers used these resources to form new ideas and identities for themselves, which splintered any hope of a master narrative.
Dr. Chambliss is also co-Scholar Editor (with Laura Helton) on the NHPRC-Mellon planning grant, “Remaking the World of Arturo Schomburg.” This two-year grant supports the launch of a pilot digital edition about Schomburg’s seeding of two collections in Harlem and Nashville between 1925 and 1931. This pilot edition will feature selected documents from the New York Public Library’s and Fisk University’s digitized collections, and the edition will include annotations and scholarly essays to help contextualize these items.
Dr. Chambliss’s research has been supported by the Institute for Citizens and Scholars (formerly the Woodrow Wilson Foundation), the Ford Foundation, the Black Metropolis Research Consortium, and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Her work has been published in the Journal of African American History, the African American Review journal, and the edited collection The Unfinished Book. Prior to her ACLS fellowship, Dr. Chambliss was an assistant professor in the Humanities, History, and Social Sciences department at Columbia College Chicago. She earned her Ph.D. in African American Studies and American Studies from Yale University and was a postdoctoral fellow in the African American Studies department at Northwestern University.
In Fall 2024, Dr. Chambliss will be joining University of Rochester’s History department as an assistant professor.