Heather Tirado-Gilligan

Heather Tirado Gilligan is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Black Studies at the University of California Santa Barbara and a researcher at the Center for Black Studies. She earned a BA in English from the University of Maryland and a doctorate in English from Rutgers University. Dr. Tirado Gilligan’s research develops and analyzes an archive of uncollected essays and sketches by writers of color culled from nineteenth century American literary magazines such as the Atlantic Monthly, the Nation, and the Independent. Her dissertation, entitled “The Form of Fulfillment: Race, Genre, and Imperialism in American Periodical Culture, 1880-1910,” documents and examines the significant participation of writers of color in the intellectual culture of post-bellum America.

While at the Center in the Spring 2005, Dr. Tirado Gilligan will continue her examination of late nineteenth and early twentieth century literary magazines, focusing in particular on Edward E. Wilson and Caroline Pemberton, previously unknown writers she discovered in her archival research. Essays by Wilson, an African American lawyer who wrote for the Atlantic Monthly as well as prominent Black periodicals, and Pemberton, a white socialist and outspoken supporter of racial justice who wrote on lynching for the Arena, are particularly significant because they expand our sense of what it was possible for writers to say about race in Jim Crow America. In addition to her work on Pemberton and Wilson, Dr. Tirado Gilligan will develop a website that makes available to the public selections from her archive of nineteenth century writers via the Center for Black Studies.