Miles P. Grier and Chelsea Phillips Recognized for Excellence with Prestigious SAA, EAL, and SEASECS Awards

R/18 Collective members Miles P. Grier and Chelsea Phillips are being recognized nationally for innovative research that reframes our understanding of the long eighteenth century and its legacy. Their culturally complex and nuanced accounts of gender, race, and the business of theatre in early modern and eighteenth-century performance in both Inkface and Carrying All Before Her are built on substantive archival research and interdisciplinary expertise.

Miles P. Grier

Miles P. Grier, an Associate Professor of English at Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center, just received the 2024 Early American Literature Book Prize for his debut monograph Inkface: Othello and White Authority in the Era of Atlantic Slavery. Grier also won the Shakespeare Association of America’s First Book Award for Inkface, which was published by the University of Virginia Press in 2023.

In Inkface, Grier brings to light the crucial role of blackface in making stage moors and their lovers into reading material. Grier unearths this buried story and the materiality of its race-making work through extensive archival work and attention to the material practices of costuming, corking, and performance. Inkface provides a necessary supplement to dominant intellectual histories of race as a concept. Grier’s groundbreaking and interdisciplinary contribution to literary history, performance studies, book history (especially the history of print and the history of reading), and the history of race in the early modern Atlantic world is also a lucid and delightful read. It combines innovative archival work, analytical brilliance, theoretical sophistication, and lucid prose and in the process, weaves together a fascinating and multifaceted cultural history of Othello. You can find out more about Grier's process, how his work tracks the formation of white supremacy, and how racism is a habit of treating groups of people as "marked" for life in this interview with the author.

Phillips Wins 2025 Annibel Jenkins Prize

Chelsea Phillips

Chelsea Phillips just won the Annibel Jenkins Prize in Performance and Theatre Studies for “Accommodations for Pregnancy and Childbirth on the Late Eighteenth-Century London Stage,” which appeared in Eighteenth-Century Studies 56.3 (Spring 2023): 425-447. Phillips’ article and her first book, Carrying All Before Her: Celebrity Pregnancy on the London Stage, 1689-1800, which won honorable mention from the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender for best first book in 2024, explore the working lives of celebrity actresses and the impact that their pregnancies had on their careers, the maternity leave policies of theatres, and audience reception in the long eighteenth century. You can hear Phillips talking about the project in this podcast interview from the New Books in Women’s History podcast. The Annibel Jenkins prize was established to honor Jenkins, an early biographer of Elizabeth Inchbald and a scholar of her work. Jenkins was one of the founding members of the Southeastern American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.