Overview
Charline Jao is a PhD candidate whose research focuses on the American nineteenth century. Her dissertation, “Early Lost,” looks at the temporality of child death and separation in texts by nineteenth-century American women writers, with an emphasis on events not easily absorbed into sentimentalism or nation-making such as infanticide and abandonment.
Jao is the creator of two digital humanities projects: Periodical Poets, a catalogue of poetry published in New York City periodicals run by Black editors in the nineteenth century, and No Stain of Tears and Blood, a collection of material related to the abolitionist free labor/free produce movement. Her work has been published in the Cornell Rural Humanities Initiative Pamphlet collection and American Periodicals. She has held a residency at Quarry Farm, and will be a short-term fellow at the American Antiquarian Society in Fall 2023. More recently, she was the recipient of the Harry Falkenau Graduate Teaching Fellowship at Cornell for the upcoming Spring 2024 writing course, “The American Railroad On/Off Screen.”
Research Focus
- 19th Century America
- Print Culture
- Abolition
- Digital Humanities