Professor
Michele Lise Tarter received her B.A. from Roanoke College and her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Colorado/Boulder. She teaches courses on Early American Literature, The Witch in Literature, Literature of the Prison, and Women’s Autobiographies, Diaries, and Letters. She has established a memoir-writing program in New Jersey’s only maximum-security prison for women, working with TCNJ students in co-teaching aninmates’ writing workshop behind bars. For the past 16 consecutive years, Dr. Tarter has led study-abroad courses in England and Europe, taking students to numerous “Literary Landscapes” to bring literature to life. Professor Tarter’s research interests include transatlantic Quaker women’s prophesying and writing, the body and cultural studies in early American literature, and women’s prison literature.
Selected Publications
Books:
- New Critical Studies on Early Quaker Women, 1650-1800. Co-Edited with Catie Gill. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.
- Buried Lives: Incarcerated in Early America. Co-edited with Richard Bell. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012.
- A Centre of Wonders: The Body in Early America. Co-edited with Janet Moore Lindman. Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 2001.
Articles:
- “Written from the Body of Sisterhood: Quaker Women’s Prophesying and the Creation of a New Word.” In New Critical Studies on Early Quaker Women, 1650-1800. Eds. Michele Lise Tarter and Catie Gill. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. 69-87.
- “’That You May Be Perfect in Love’: The Prophecy of Dorothy White.” In Early Quakers and Their Theological Thought, 1647-1723. Eds. Stephen W. Angell and Pink Dandelion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 155-172.
- “‘varied trials, dippings, and strippings’: Quaker Women’s Irresistible Call to the Early South.” Feminist Interventions in Early American Studies. Ed. Mary Carruth. University of Alabama Press, 2006. 80-93.
- “Reading A Quakers’ Book!: Elizabeth Ashbridge’s Testimony of Quaker Literary Theory.” Quaker Studies, 9:2 (2005): 176-190.
- “‘Go North!’ : The Journey towards First Generation Friends and their Prophecy of Celestial Flesh.” The Creation of Quaker Theory. Ed. B.P. Dandelion. London: Ashgate Press, 2004. 83-98.
- “Quaking in the Light: The Politics of Quaker Women’s Corporeal Prophecy in the Seventeenth-Century Transatlantic World.” In A Centre of Wonders: The Body in Early America. Eds. Janet Moore Lindman and Michele Lise Tarter. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001. 145-162.
- “Bringing Forth Life from Body to Text: The Reclamation of Childbirth in Women’s Literature.” “This Giving Birth”: Pregnancy and Childbirth in American Women’s Writing. Eds. Julie Tharp and Susan MacCallum Whitcomb. Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 2000. 19-37.
- “The Autobiography of Jane Fenn Hoskens, Travelling Friend.” Dictionary of Literary Biography: American Women Prose Writers to 1820.Eds. Carla Mulford with Angela Vietto and Amy Winans. Columbia, SC : Bruccoli Clark Layman, Inc., 1998. 187-194.