Godfrey, Mollie

Mollie came to Bates in 2010 as a Visiting Professor of English, having just completed her Ph.D. at the University of Chicago. She specializes in African American literature and politics of the Jim Crow period, with training and teaching experience in early to contemporary American and African American literature, the novel, transatlantic modernism, community histories and the archive. Her book manuscript, “Humankinds: Humanism and Race in American Fiction, 1903–1963,” argues that writers of the Jim Crow period such as W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Nella Larsen, Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Ann Petry, Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin recognized and repudiated the exclusion of African Americans from Western humanism while seeking to create a more universal concept of humanity—one that could serve as a justification for the human rights, egalitarianism, and democracy for which they fought. At Bates, Mollie has taught courses on racial passing, the African American novel, and African American literature, and will be teaching courses on American realism, U.S. fiction, and early American literature in the 2011–2012 academic year. She will also be continuing her short term course on the Portland Branch of the NAACP, in which students will have the rare opportunity to work hands-on with primary source materials not only by organizing and describing Portland Branch papers, but by curating an exhibit based on those papers that will be displayed at the Sampson Center for Diversity in Maine in May 2012.