Carolyn L. Karcher

Carolyn L. Karcher is professor emerita of English, American studies and women’s studies at Temple University, where she taught for 21 years and received the Great Teacher Award and the Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching in 2002. She is the author of Shadow Over the Promised Land: Slavery, Race, and Violence in Melville’s America (1980); The First Woman in the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child (1994); and A Refugee from His Race: Albion W. Tourgée and His Fight against White Supremacy (2016). She has also edited scholarly reprints of works by several 19th-century writers, including Tourgée’s novel about Black Reconstruction in North Carolina, Bricks Without Straw.