A Talk by Carol Bensick, PhD
DATE: Friday, March 18, 2022
TIME: 12:00 -1:00 PM (PST)
LOCATION: Zoom (RSVP to receive link)
The South has been decidedly underrepresented in the growing canon of antebellum nineteenth century American women philosophers. Louisa McCord stands out as a promising candidate to correct this imbalance. In a period where the essay format was almost exclusively the province of men, McCord wrote and published numerous essays in respected Southern journals. These were identified, collected, and edited in the mid 1990s. Even so, the recovery of forgotten women philosophers was only getting underway at that time and many still went unnoticed. This talk will make a first step toward becoming acquainted with McCord and discovering the similarities and differences between her work and that of her already established contemporaries from the North.
Carol Bensick earned her PhD in American Literary and Intellectual History from 1620 to 1914 at Cornell University. As a Research Affiliate at the UCLA Center for the Study of Women, she has given conference papers and published blog posts on unknown and barely known women philosophers such as Nancy Kingsbury Wollstonecraft of New Hampshire and Julia Ward Howe of Massachusetts, as well as on John Dewey’s and William James’s interactions with women philosophical students and friends. Her chapters on philosophers Sarah Dorsey of Mississippi and Amalie Hathaway of Michigan are forthcoming in Springer and Oxford collections respectively. Her latest nineteenth-century philosophical interest is political essayist Louisa McCord of South Carolina.
