Communities Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina ’72
Book examines life of a family of freed New England slaves
“This idea of degrees of oppression is very difficult for some people to imagine if they think that it’s not something that happens here,” said alumna Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina at a Marlboro reading and discussion in September. “They think that something happened elsewhere and it’s a terrible thing. But then we had the Civil Rights movement and everything’s okay.”
Gerzina’s latest book, Mr. and Mrs. Prince, tells the story of Bijah and Lucy, a remarkable 18th century, African-American couple who gained freedom from slavery in New England but never completely escaped oppression. “Bijah and Lucy were very much taking their lives into their own hands,” said Gerzina. “They were changing what we think about as the black person living in a place where they were the minority but had a very strong sense of their rights and the way they should live in the world.”
Gerzina is the Kathe Tappe Vernon Professor in Biography at Dartmouth College, where she also chairs the English department, the first African-American woman to do so in the Ivy League. She hosts the nationally-syndicated radio program, The Book Show, which interviews authors on their recent books. Guests have included Toni Morrison, David McCullough, Anna Quindlen, A.S. Byatt, Michael Eric Dyson, Salman Rushdie, Tracy Chevalier and Michael Cunningham. Her interview with Jamaica Kincaid won an honorable mention from the Communicator Awards for those in the national media.
Gerzina is the recipient of two grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and has been the Fulbright Distinguished Scholar to Great Britain. She is an honorary fellow at the University of Exeter in Devon, England. She teaches courses on the novel, biography, Bloomsbury and black literature. She received her Ph.D. from Stanford University.
"Marlboro gave me a certain kind of intellectual stamina that other people don’t have. When I went to Stanford to get my Ph.D., having come from a place like Marlboro, people were already talking about how hard it was going to be to write a dissertation. I said, I know how to write a dissertation, I went to Marlboro," Gerzina said at the beginning of a lecture she presented during the Marlboro College fall 2008 orientation. "There is something here about that concentrated time, getting the time to think, the time to really work through your ideas, and to talk about them with people that is totally invaluable. I felt completely prepared to have the kind of professional life I have."
Read more about Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina, including an excerpt from Mr. and Mrs. Prince, in the next issue of Potash Hill, due out in December of 2008.
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- MBA in Managing for Sustainability featured speakers
Photos, Video and Audio taken by Marlboro College with permission of performer.