Louise Michel addressing the crowd at Les Invalides | Le Journal Illustré (1883)
literary critic.
cultural historian.
avid knitter.
Louise Michel in America
Rethinking Nineteenth-Century Radicalism on the Move
This book uncovers the extraordinary influence the nineteenth-century French militant activist Louise Michel wielded in the United States without ever setting foot there, revealing not only how her radical politics, public trials, and transnational networks reshaped American feminist, anarchist, and socialist movements but also her astonishing visibility and reach beyond radical circles.
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“Tasting Children’s Literature: An Edible Read-A-Thon” is an immersive experience and read-a-thon of classic and contemporary children’s literature aimed at young children up to the age of 8.
The workshop will engage children in drawing pictures of and telling stories about the foods that come to life in their favourite stories, as well as the foods that mean most to them and their communities.
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Participants met with the lead curator at the Working Class Movement Library, learned how to digitise rare materials, perused a variety of rare posters, pamphlets, memoirs and other bits from the WCML’s collection which deal with motherhood and radical movements (or demands for better structures of care), selected a set of items to ditigise and jointly reflected on why these item should be made available to a broader audience through digitisation.
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Featuring Dr. Kate Connelly (Arcadia) on the free nurseries that Sylvia Pankhurst organized in East London, Dr. Nick Grant (UEA) on South African anti-apartheid campaigner Dora Tamana's travels to the World Congress of Mothers in Switzerland in 1955, Dr. Monica Pearl (Manchester) on women's AIDS memoirs and the politics of motherhood in ACT-UP, and myself on late- nineteenth-century US anarchist activists who reconfigured motherhood and grappled with maternal ambivalence in ways that continue to resonate with our own moment.
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This project, funded by a 2022-3 School of Arts, Languages and Cultures Social Responsibility grant, brought together scholars, artists, activists and mental health practitioners for a series of immersive public events at the Whitworth Art Gallery and the Working Class Movement Library reflecting on the challenges of contemporary motherhood.
Public Engagement
Featured Publications
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Louise Michel in America
RUTGERS (FORTHCOMING)
This book uncovers the extraordinary influence the nineteenth-century French militant activist Louise Michel wielded in the United States without ever setting foot there, revealing not only how her radical politics, public trials, and transnational networks reshaped American feminist, anarchist, and socialist movements but also her astonishing visibility and reach beyond radical circles. -
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Sensational Internationalism
EDINBURGH (2016)
In refocusing attention on the Paris Commune as a key event in American political and cultural memory, Sensational Internationalism radically changes our understanding of the relationship between France and the United States in the long nineteenth century. -
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New York: A Literary Anthology
MACMILLAN (2026)
Ed. J Michelle CoghlanNew York – the city that never sleeps – is brought to life in this vivid and lively anthology. From Staten Island to the Statue of Liberty, for centuries, authors and poets have been inspired to write about the heady highs and formidable lows of New York: its people, places and unique history.
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Cambridge Companion to Literature and Food
CAMBRIDGE (2020)
Ed. J Michelle CoghlanThis Companion provides an engaging and expansive overview of gustation, gastronomy, agriculture and alimentary activism in literature from the medieval period to the present day, as well as an illuminating introduction to cookbooks as literature.
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The Awakening and Other Stories
MACMILLAN (2018)
Ed. J. Michelle Coghlan
Readers and critics were scandalized by The Awakening when it was first published, but it is now regarded as among the boldest and earliest examples of feminist fiction. It is published here with a selection of Chopin’s strikingly perceptive short stories and introduced by Dr J. Michelle Coghlan, a specialist in American literature.
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Radical Henry James
JOHNS HOPKINS (FALL 2023)
Eds. J. Michelle Coghlan and John Funchion
Reconsidering untapped radical energies in James's writings alongside revelations regarding his entanglements with radical London made possible by The Complete Letters of Henry James, this "Radical James" special issue works to read radicalism not just out of but back into James.
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Tasting Modernism
NEBRASKA (2014)
“Tasting Modernism” is a project of reattuning ourselves to modernism’s gustatory designs (and appetites); it’s also about reconsidering how the culinary life of modernism might speak to our own moment’s hypermediated obsession with—and no less charged anxieties about—how and what we eat.
