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. The chapters examine child loss in the poetry of Frances Harper, incarceration and execution narratives in Lydia Maria Child’s Fact and Fiction, and friendship albums held by the women of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society.
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, and is forthcoming in Comparative Literature and the Mark Twain Annual. Her research has been supported by the Society for the Humanities at Cornell, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Quarry Farm Fellowship Program at the Center for Mark Twain Studies. She also received the Harry Falkenau Graduate Teaching Fellowship at Cornell for the Spring 2024 writing course, “The American Railroad On/Off Screen.”
Research Focus
- 19th Century America
- Print Culture
- Abolition
- Digital Humanities