Faith
Barrett, assistant professor of English, is writing a book on American poetry
written in response to the Civil War; in the process, she is focusing on the
work of well-known poets such as Walt Whitman and Herman Melville but also
on unpublished soldier poets, women writers who responded to the war, the work
of African American poets, and poetry that appeared in newspapers and magazines
during the war years. She served as co-editor for the anthology, ‘To
fight aloud, is very brave’: Poetry of the American Civil War, which
has been accepted for publication by the University of Massachusetts Press,
and her essay, “Addresses to a Divided Nation: Images of War in Emily
Dickinson and Walt Whitman,” has been accepted for publication by the
Arizona Quarterly. On campus, she delivered a lecture, “Drums Off the
Phantom Battlements: American Poets and the Civil War,” as one of the
events accompanying a traveling exhibition, “Forever Free: Abraham Lincoln’s
Journey to Emancipation,” that was displayed in the Seeley G. Mudd Library.
In addition, she delivered papers at this year’s sessions of the Emily
Dickinson International Society Conference and the American Literature Association
Conference. A member of the Lawrence faculty since 2003, she earned the Ph.D.
in comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley, and the
M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Iowa.