If you weren’t able to join us for the 2025 Annual Meeting, please join us after the fact. In October, the Collaborative was joined by Jennifer Rycenga, author of Schooling the Nation: The Success of the Canterbury Female Academy (University of Illinois Press, 2025), a Professor Emerita in the Humanities Department at San José State University. Her scholarly work has focused on the Abolitionist movement, exploring areas previously hidden or marginalized, such as Black women’s activities and voices, the anti-racist work of white Abolitionists, and networks of families and friends involved in the struggles against slavery and injustice.
While it may seem easy to deem the Canterbury Academy a failure, Jennifer Rycenga, author of Schooling the Nation: The Success of the Canterbury Female Academy (University of Illinois Press, 2025), demonstrates how a closer examination, focusing on Black women, proves its success – in its inception, its sustenance, its legal battles, in the rich and varied lives of the students after the school, and in the myriad accomplishments of their descendants. Join us for a lively discussion of these early non-violent yet tenacious students, teachers, and their abolitionist networks. Their example, against seemingly insurmountable opposition, can speak to us today. Furthermore, the importance in maintaining sites like the Prudence Crandall Museum in Connecticut, and amplifying the centrality of interracial American women’s history has never been more needed than at the present moment.
Rycenga’s other work ranges widely across feminist musicology (co-editor with Sheila Whiteley of Queering the Popular Pitch, Routledge 2006), global feminism (Frontline Feminisms, co-edited with Marguerite Waller, Routledge 2001), and lesbian philosophy (The Mary Daly Reader, co-edited with Linda Barufaldi, New York University Press, 2017). Her next major work will examine the Convergence of justice, history, feminism, music, and the natural world. In our current national crisis she has taken to Substack, where she writes essays that thread history into the news, to suggest ways we can collectively move towards a better future. While fighting tyranny is a full-time preoccupation, Rycenga makes time to be an amateur naturalist and bird-watcher. She lives in Rochester, New York with her wife Peggy Macres, two cats and a dog.