Faith Barrett, assistant professor of English, is writing a book on American poetry written in response to the Civil War; in the process, she is focusing on the work of well-known poets such as Walt Whitman and Herman Melville but also on unpublished soldier poets, women writers who responded to the war, the work of African American poets, and poetry that appeared in newspapers and magazines during the war years.
She served as co-editor for the anthology, ‘To fight aloud, is very brave’: Poetry of the American Civil War, which has been accepted for publication by the University of Massachusetts Press, and her essay, “Addresses to a Divided Nation: Images of War in Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman,” has been accepted for publication by the Arizona Quarterly.
On campus, she delivered a lecture, “Drums Off the Phantom Battlements: American Poets and the Civil War,” as one of the events accompanying a traveling exhibition, “Forever Free: Abraham Lincoln’s Journey to Emancipation,” that was displayed in the Seeley G. Mudd Library. In addition, she delivered papers at this year’s sessions of the Emily Dickinson International Society Conference and the American Literature Association Conference.
A member of the Lawrence faculty since 2003, she earned the Ph.D. in comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley, and the M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Iowa.
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