Carla Kaplan

Carla Kaplan, a professor of American literature at Northeastern University who has written about Walker’s work, said she is one of many influential progressive figures who have made profoundly contentious statements. “The question becomes, what do we do with one another when these moments happen,” Kaplan said. “One answer is that we cancel one another. […]

Other New England recipients and their projects include Yale University lecturer Edward Ball, who is writing about a Reconstruction-era klansman; Nicholas Basbanes, of North Grafton, on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; Wesleyan University professor Andrew Curran on Denis Diderot; Smith College professor Michael Gorra on William Faulkner and the Civil War; Trinity College professor Christopher Hager on […]

Here is a full list of the newly named Public Scholars, their professional affiliations, book titles and grant amounts: • Thomas Andrews, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colo, “Animals in the History of the United States,” $50,400. • Edward Ball, Yale University, New Haven, Conn., “Constant LeCorgne (1832-1886): Biography of a Klansman,” $50,400. • Nicholas Basbanes, independent scholar, North […]

What does it mean to identify across race lines and to claim a racial identity disconnected from background or biology? Why does so-called reverse passing (white to black) generate such extraordinary attention and controversy? The Rachel Dolezal case reveals a conundrum in race debates that remains unresolved.

Who could save America from fascism in the 1940s? Feminists, according to Wonder Woman’s creator, William Moulton Marston, in the form of Sapphists, coeds and Amazons. Marston created Wonder Woman to demonstrate how “feminine rule” would look and to cash in on the explosive popularity of comics, read by staggering numbers of people in the […]

Carla Kaplan, a professor of American literature at Northeastern University, is the 2014 winner of the Boston Authors Club’s Julia Ward Howe Award for “Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance” (HarperCollins). “Miss Anne” is a term applied to white women who played a role in the Harlem Renaissance, some of […]

Carla Kaplan, a professor of American literature at Northeastern University, offers a joint biography of six largely forgotten women (winnowed down from five dozen whom she researched) in “Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance” (Harper, $28.99). The convention-bending women included philanthropists, educators, heiresses and novelists who figured in the Harlem Renaissance of […]

There may be no clearer embodiment of that idealism than the Misses Anne of Carla Kaplan’s intriguing new book: the white women who in one fashion or another decided to make the Harlem Renaissance their own. Kaplan, the Davis distinguished professor of American literature at Northeastern University, admits that it was a minuscule group, largely […]