Teaching the woman of colour and transatlantic women — a roundtable on The Woman of Colour (1808) : pedagogic and critical approaches (Roundtable)

• Main Author: Krueger, Misty
• Other Authors: School of Humanities
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: 2021
• Subjects: Humanities::Literature::English
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/148551
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

In 2015, I first taught a special topics course at The University of Maine at Farmington (a small, public liberal arts university) I called “Transatlantic Eighteenth-Century Women.” I have since taught the course two more times and have added it to my Eng-lish department’s recurring curriculum. This course focuses on long eighteenth-century women writers who traveled transatlantically and the women travelers they portray in their writings. I wanted students to see that British and American women not only wrote transat-lantic tales but also traveled in a space that has been coded as male and masculine. The course, and that very idea, inspired me to edit a volume of essays on transatlantic women travelers, which includes an essay by Octavia Cox on The Woman of Colour—a text I had not even heard of when I first designed the course. Once I read this novel, though, I realized that it was a perfect fit for my class.