Mollie Barnes, PhD

Mollie Barnes, PhD   

Associate Professor of English

Library Room 255

One University Boulevard

Bluffton, SC 29909

Office: 843-208-8367

mbarnes2@uscb.edu

CV_Barnes.pdf

My name is Mollie Barnes, and I’m an Associate Professor of English at USCB. My specialty is nineteenth-century U.S. literature—a field that invites us to trace dynamic changes in our world, locally and globally, at the same time.

Most falls, I teach Composition and Rhetoric, Introduction to English Studies, and an upper-division literature seminar. Most springs, I teach Composition and Literature, Survey of American Literatures, and an upper-division literature seminar. My expertise in nineteenth-century women writers shapes my seminars in African-American Literature; American Literature, 1830–1860; American Literature, 1860–1910; American Novel to 1914; Historical Literature; and Transatlantic Literature. I teach classes on both the Beaufort and the Bluffton campuses.

I’ve published nearly a dozen articles and book chapters on nineteenth-century women writers, including Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Margaret Fuller, Charlotte Forten Grimké, Fanny Kemble, Emma Lazarus, and Edith Wharton. My first book—Paper Heroines: Women Writers in Conversation and Community Across the Sea Islands, 1838–1902 (USC Press, February 2026)— studies the ways women documented their own and one another’s lives in diaries and biographies, focusing especially on the intersection of gender and race. The National Endowment for the Humanities supported this research with a 2023 Summer Stipend. I’m writing two new books: Laura Matilda Towne, Abolitionist: Penn School Diaries, 1862–1864 and Ednah Dow Littlehale Cheney and Nineteenth-Century Women’s Lives: A Cultural Biography.

I serve as First Vice President of the Margaret Fuller Society. Fuller is the heart of my teaching and scholarship; her weekly conversazione drew people to her work and into her circle, and with well-known intensity that matches the respect she now garners as an author and editor, an activist and feminist. I count Fuller’s love of conversation as just one of many literary pearls reminding me how fortunate I am to think and talk about ideas with good people each day.