On each of the first four Tuesdays in July, The Mastheads will host a literary lecture on the lovely outdoor terrace of the Berkshire Athenaeum. For our first lecture, Professor Meredith McGill of Rutgers University will discuss the work of Berkshire writers and activists Catherine Maria Sedgwick and Fanny Kemble. 

Meredith L McGill is an Associate Professor of English. She is the author of American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1837-1853 (2003) a study of nineteenth-century American resistance to tight control over intellectual property. She has edited two collections of essays: Taking Liberties with the Author (2013), which explores the persistence of the author as a shaping force in literary criticism, and The Traffic in Poems: Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Transatlantic Exchange (2008), in which a variety of scholars model ways of understanding nineteenth-century poetry within a transatlantic frame. Her overview of the last thirty-five years of scholarship on book history and intellectual property can be found in Book History 16 (2013). She is currently completing a study of poetry and mass-culture in the antebellum U.S. Her research and teaching interests include nineteenth-century American literature, the history of the book in American culture, American poetry and poetics, law and literature, literary theory, and media history.