Outstanding Faculty Research Award

2010

History of Women Religious Conference, Awarded June 2010 to Masterless Mistresses: The New Orleans Ursulines and the Development of a New World Society: 1727-1834

Distinguished Book Award

2008

Southern Association for Women Historians, Awarded to Masterless Mistresses: The New Orleans Ursulines and the Development of a New World Society: 1727-1834

Julia Cherry Spruill Prize

Exotic, seductive, and doomed: the antebellum mixed-race free woman of color has long operated as a metaphor for New Orleans. Commonly known as a "quadroon," she and the city she represents rest irretrievably condemned in the popular historical imagination by the linked sins of slavery and interracial sex. However, as Emily Clark shows, the rich archives of New Orleans tell a different story. Free women of color with ancestral roots in New Orleans were as likely to marry in the 1820s as white women. And marriage, not concubinage, was the basis of their family structure. In The Strange History of the American Quadroon, Clark investigates how the narrative of the erotic colored mistress became an elaborate literary and commercial trope, persisting as a symbol that long outlived the political and cultural purposes for which it had been created. Untangling myth and memory, she presents a dramatically new and nuanced understanding of the myths and realities of New Orleans's free women of color.

The Strange History of the American Quadroon: Free Women of Color in the Revolutionary Atlantic World

Nineteenth Century Collections Online: European Literature, 1790-1840: The Corvey Collection includes the full-text of more than 9,500 English, French and German titles. The collection is sourced from the remarkable library of Victor Amadeus, whose Castle Corvey collection was one of the most spectacular discoveries of the late 1970s. The Corvey Collection comprises one of the most important collections of Romantic era writing in existence anywhere -- including fiction, short prose, dramatic works, poetry, and more -- with a focus on especially difficult-to-find works by lesser-known, historically neglected writers.The Corvey library was built during the last half of the 19th century by Victor and his wife Elise, both bibliophiles with varied interests. The collection thus contains everything from novels and short stories to belles lettres and more populist works, and includes many exceedingly rare works not available in any other collection from the period. These invaluable, sometimes previously unknown works are of particular interest to scholars and researchers.European Literature, 1790-1840: The Corvey Collection includes: * Novels and Gothic Novels* Short Stories* Belles-Lettres* Short Prose Forms* Dramatic Works* Poetry* Anthologies* And moreSelected with the guidance of an international team of expert advisors, these primary sources are invaluable for a wide range of academic disciplines and areas of study, providing never before possible research opportunities for one of the most studied historical periods.Additional MetadataPrimary Id: B0265903PSM Id: NCCOF0063-C00000-B0265903DVI Collection Id: NCCOC0062Bibliographic Id: NCCO002482Reel: 252MCODE: 4UVCOriginal Publisher: Printed at the Minerva-Press, for Lane, Newman and Co.Original Publication Year: 1805Original Publication Place: LondonVariant TitlesMaid of PortugalSubjectsEnglish fiction -- 19th century.

The Banks of the Douro: or, The Maid of Portugal, a Tale; VOL. III

During French colonial rule in Louisiana, nuns from the French Company of Saint Ursula came to New Orleans, where they educated women and girls of European, Indian, and African descent, enslaved and free, in literacy, numeracy, and the Catholic faith. Although religious women had gained acceptance and authority in seventeenth-century France, the New World was less welcoming. Emily Clark explores the transformations required of the Ursulines as their distinctive female piety collided with slave society, Spanish colonial rule, and Protestant hostility.The Ursulines gained prominence in New Orleans through the social services they provided--schooling, an orphanage, and refuge for abused and widowed women--which also allowed them a self-sustaining level of corporate wealth. Clark traces the conflicts the Ursulines encountered through Spanish colonial rule (1767-1803) and after the Louisiana Purchase, as Protestants poured into Louisiana and were dismayed to find a powerful community of self-supporting women and a church congregation dominated by African Americans. The unmarried nuns contravened both the patriarchal order of the slaveholding American South and the Protestant construction of femininity that supported it. By incorporating their story into the history of early America, Masterless Mistresses exposes the limits of the republican model of national unity.

Masterless Mistresses: The New Orleans Ursulines and the Development of a New World Society, 1727-1834

Nineteenth Century Collections Online: European Literature, 1790-1840: The Corvey Collection includes the full-text of more than 9,500 English, French and German titles. The collection is sourced from the remarkable library of Victor Amadeus, whose Castle Corvey collection was one of the most spectacular discoveries of the late 1970s. The Corvey Collection comprises one of the most important collections of Romantic era writing in existence anywhere -- including fiction, short prose, dramatic works, poetry, and more -- with a focus on especially difficult-to-find works by lesser-known, historically neglected writers.The Corvey library was built during the last half of the 19th century by Victor and his wife Elise, both bibliophiles with varied interests. The collection thus contains everything from novels and short stories to belles lettres and more populist works, and includes many exceedingly rare works not available in any other collection from the period. These invaluable, sometimes previously unknown works are of particular interest to scholars and researchers.European Literature, 1790-1840: The Corvey Collection includes: * Novels and Gothic Novels* Short Stories* Belles-Lettres* Short Prose Forms* Dramatic Works* Poetry* Anthologies* And moreSelected with the guidance of an international team of expert advisors, these primary sources are invaluable for a wide range of academic disciplines and areas of study, providing never before possible research opportunities for one of the most studied historical periods.Additional MetadataPrimary Id: B0960001PSM Id: NCCOF0063-C00000-B0960001DVI Collection Id: NCCOC0062Bibliographic Id: NCCO021021Reel: 8162MCODE: 4UVCOriginal Publisher: Printed for the author, and sold by James WallisOriginal Publication Year: 1800Original Publication Place: LondonVariant TitlesCottage of the ValeSubjectsEnglish fiction -- 19th century

Ermina Montrose: or, The Cottage of the Vale: in Three Volumes: With Characters From Life; VOL. I

Nineteenth Century Collections Online: European Literature, 1790-1840: The Corvey Collection includes the full-text of more than 9,500 English, French and German titles. The collection is sourced from the remarkable library of Victor Amadeus, whose Castle Corvey collection was one of the most spectacular discoveries of the late 1970s. The Corvey Collection comprises one of the most important collections of Romantic era writing in existence anywhere -- including fiction, short prose, dramatic works, poetry, and more -- with a focus on especially difficult-to-find works by lesser-known, historically neglected writers.The Corvey library was built during the last half of the 19th century by Victor and his wife Elise, both bibliophiles with varied interests. The collection thus contains everything from novels and short stories to belles lettres and more populist works, and includes many exceedingly rare works not available in any other collection from the period. These invaluable, sometimes previously unknown works are of particular interest to scholars and researchers.European Literature, 1790-1840: The Corvey Collection includes: * Novels and Gothic Novels* Short Stories* Belles-Lettres* Short Prose Forms* Dramatic Works* Poetry* Anthologies* And moreSelected with the guidance of an international team of expert advisors, these primary sources are invaluable for a wide range of academic disciplines and areas of study, providing never before possible research opportunities for one of the most studied historical periods.Additional MetadataPrimary Id: B0265901PSM Id: NCCOF0063-C00000-B0265901DVI Collection Id: NCCOC0062Bibliographic Id: NCCO002482Reel: 252MCODE: 4UVCOriginal Publisher: Printed at the Minerva-Press, for Lane, Newman and Co.Original Publication Year: 1805Original Publication Place: LondonVariant TitlesMaid of PortugalSubjectsEnglish fiction -- 19th century.

The Banks of the Douro: or, The Maid of Portugal, a Tale; VOL. I

A member of the prestigious Association of American Universities, Tulane University is consistently ranked among the top 50 universities in the nation. With research and educational partnerships that span the globe and its location in historic New Orleans, Tulane offers undergraduate, graduate and professional degrees in the liberal arts, science and engineering, architecture, business, law, social work, medicine and public health and tropical medicine.

Tulane University

Emily Clark is a historian of early America and the Atlantic world with a specialization in New Orleans and the French Caribbean. Her research interests include race, gender, religion and the place of New Orleans and the French Caribbean in early American history.

Francophone Atlantic

Historical Memory

American Colonial History

World History

Early America

Faculty Profile

University of North Carolina Press Author Profile

LSU Press Author Profile

Amazon Profile

Quadroons for Beginners: Discussing the Suppressed and Sexualized History of Free Women of Color with Author Emily Clark

Galvez Papers

Professor

The cities of New Orleans and Saint-Louis, Senegal were both founded as French colonies.  They share histories, cultural traditions, and, by virtue of their geographic location at the edge of threatened estuarian landscapes, a common challenge to their futures.  Barriers of language and distance have impeded both scholarly and public awareness of these deep connections.

On April 22-25, 2013, the second of this two part conference comes to New Orleans bringing together intellectuals and artists from Africa, Europe, the United States and Canada for the explicit purpose of producing a new account of the two places that recognizes their connection to one another.  It is a model for the truly transnational production of new knowledge that is essential in today's global context.

Emily Clark, Associate Professor of History at Tulane University, discusses the importance of donor and alumni engagement to provide the means for such an extraordinary event to take place.

Emily Clark

Media

Biography

Areas of Expertise

Accomplishments

Outstanding Faculty Research Award

Distinguished Book Award

Julia Cherry Spruill Prize

Education

Tulane University

Links

Media Appearances

Quadroons for Beginners: Discussing the Suppressed and Sexualized History of Free Women of Color with Author Emily Clark

Galvez Papers