2023 Schewe Lecture: Obour Tanner’s Archive; or, How to Remember Your (Famous) Friend, Phillis Wheatley

The CHPDC is collaborating with the Friends of UW-Madison Libraries to host Dr. Tara A. Bynum from the University of Iowa to give this year’s Annual Schewe Lecture. The event will take place on Thursday October 19th from 4:30-5:30pm at the Wisconsin Historical Society Auditorium. Dr. Bynum will discuss the archive of correspondence between the Phillis Wheatley and her friend Obour Tanner, two eighteenth-century women born in Africa and enslaved in colonial New England who maintained their friendship through letters.

In her recent book, Reading Pleasures: Everyday Black Living in Early America (University of Illinois Press), Bynum studies how “Wheatley’s letters [to Tanner] … reveal a friendship that asks us to consider what pleasure and friendship might look like to two enslaved women in New England.”

The Friends of the UW-Madison Libraries annually host the Schewe Lecture to promote the study and appreciation of the printed word with funds endowed for that purpose by Douglas Schewe.

For twenty-five years, the Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture has been fostering the interdisciplinary study of print and digital culture, through lectures and colloquia, biennial conferences, short-term research and long-term postdoctoral fellowships, a book series, and as a home for campus research groups. We encourage scholarly work on the authorship, reading, publication and distribution of print–and now digital–materials, produced by those not only at the center, but also the periphery of power.