Faculty Scholarship Profile: Elizabeth A. DeWolfe

Elizabeth A. DeWolfe is a scholar of Shaker history, early American women's history and the history of books.

Her interests came together in her research on Mary Marshall Dyer, an early 19th-century woman who fought against the Shakers for 50 years. Dyer became a celebrity by publishing books about her experiences and her allegations of crimes among the Shakers.

Dyer is the focus of Professor DeWolfe’s first book, Shaking the Faith: Women, Family, and Mary Marshall Dyer’s Anti-Shaker Campaign, 1815-1867, from Palgrave/St. Martin’s Press.

The implications of Prof. DeWolfe’s scholarship have relevance beyond those interested in Shaker history. Conflict with religious groups and with groups perceived as different has been a pervasive facet of American society. The anti-Shaker movement of the 1820s, she says, “is nearly identical in actions and discourse to that of the anti-Catholic movement of the 1830s, the anti-Mason movement of the same period and later attacks on the Mormons.” In the 20th century, the anti-cult campaign of the 1960s to the present day shares the same strategies of as that of its numerous predecessors. “By studying in detail attacks against the Shakers, we learn about the process of constructing a national identity (then and today) and we find who is, and who is not, included in that definition.”

DeWolfe, an assistant professor of American studies in the Department of History and Politics, earned her Ph.D. in American and New England studies at Boston University, her M.A. in anthropology from State University of New York/Albany, and an A.B. in social science from Colgate University.

Scholarship is a passion for Prof. DeWolfe, who says, somewhat wryly, that she loves spending her summers in dusty libraries and archives, examining court documents, legislative petitions, diaries, letters, family histories, newspapers, and genealogical materials. It involves piecing together puzzles, spending months or years determining what the final picture will be. She loves the hunt for information, as much as the eventual answers she finds. She believes history is alive, and through her scholarship, she helps people see, hear and feel the past and helps people connect the past to today.

Prof. DeWolfe, a recipient of the Mary Rines Thompson Award for Teaching Excellence in 1997, tries to instill a passion for research into her students. She brings primary source materials into her classes, and she and her students piece together stories or they try to determine where else they might look for information.

Prof. DeWolfe has served as chair for the last three UNE Maine Women Writers Collection biennial conferences and recently co-edited an anthology, titled Such News of the Land: American Women Nature Writers, from the 1998 conference. She is also researching and writing a second book, to be titled “Anti-Shakerism in Antebellum America.”

Prof. DeWolfe is looking forward to a sabbatical next year, during which she’ll be studying murdered mill girls and dancing Shakers. The two separate projects both revolve around public interest in bizarre events - a pregnant Saco mill girl murdered after a botched abortion and a group of traveling former Shakers who would dance and perform Shaker worships to make money. Both events were incredibly popular in the press - and are barometers of public sentiment about religious rights and the rights of women.    
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