Black Daughter of Maine, American Woman of the World: The Storied Lives and Times of Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins

Join us to learn about the life, literature, and career of Maine-born writer Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins (1859-1930). Born into an educated free black family in Portland, Pauline Hopkins was a pioneering playwright, journalist, novelist, feminist, and public intellectual, best known for her 1900 novel Contending Forces: A Romance of Negro Life North and South. Brown’s recent biography traces Hopkins’ early life, her family’s connections to eighteenth-century New England and the African slave trade, and her literary career, including a public feud with Booker T. Washington that ultimately led to her professional demise as a journalist.

Lois Brown is Elizabeth Small Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College and former director of the Weissman Center for Leadership and the Liberal Arts at the college. Lois's research, writing, and teaching focus on nineteenth-century African American and American literature and culture, New England literary history, abolitionist narratives, and evangelical juvenilia. She edited the first modern edition of Memoir of James Jackson, The Attentive and Obedient Scholar, a work published first in 1835 by Bostonian Susan Paul that is the earliest known work of African American biography (Harvard University Press, 2000). In addition to scholarly essays, she also is the author of The Literary Harlem Renaissance, an encyclopedia of the period (Facts on File, 2005), and has curated and co-curated several exhibitions for the Museum of African American History and the Boston Public Library. Lois earned her BA at Duke University and her PhD at Boston College.