Drawing on recent insights into Black Studies, feminist and queer studies, and the history of slavery, this talk rethinks Phillis Wheatley as a poet who was keenly aware of the politics of power, pleasure, sadism, and violence in the slave economy of colonial New England.

The speaker is Britt Rusert, Associate Professor and Undergraduate Program Director in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.