Cynthia Patterson
Associate Professor
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Office: CPR 301-G
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Cynthia Patterson is an Associate Professor of English and the former co-editor of the journal American Periodicals (2010-2018), the journal of the Research Society for American Periodicals. She earned a B.A. in English (Magna Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa, with Honors) from Miami University, an M.A. in English from Tulane University, and a Ph.D. in Cultural Studies from George Mason University. She taught previously at both Tulane and George Mason. In addition to her academic career, Dr. Patterson spent 20+ years in the corporate world, first as a journalist, then holding management positions in the fitness and medical fields, and operating a small business (in fitness education and consulting). She teaches a range of undergraduate and graduate courses in multiple formats, including face-to-face, hybrid, and online synchronous and asynchronous.
Her book Art for the Middle Classes: America’s Illustrated Magazines of the 1840s (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010) received financial support from several prestigious research fellowships, including the Jay and Deborah Last Fellowship in American Visual Culture from the American Antiquarian Society, the Smithsonian Institutions, Winterthur Library, and the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. Her book Race Literature: Woman Contributors to the A.M.E. Church Review, 1884 – 1924 (UP Mississippi, 2026) garnered an Andrew W. Mellon Residential Research Fellowship in African American History from the Library Company of Philadelphia and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
Her new book project on the Black Chautauqua Movement 1890-1950 won four research fellowships: the Kentucky Historical Society, Emory University, the American Antiquarian Society, and the University of Kansas.
Side projects from her first two books examine the contributions of women’s sewing and reading groups to late 19th and early 20th century labor, religion, and social reform movements.
RECENT ARTICLE AND BOOK CHAPTER PUBLICATIONS:
- Owensboro, Kentucky, and the Black Chautauqua Movement 1907 – 1929, The Journal of African American History 111:2 (Spring 2006), 258-81.
- "'written in the heart's blood': An Unpublished Novel by Black Activist James Samuel Stemons, 1900," The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 147:3 (October 2023), 105-126.
- "Notes of Travel" in the A.M.E. Church Review, 1903-1912: Precursor to the Green-Book, Feminized Sociology," Journal of African American History 1:9 52-77. (Winter 2021)
- "The Florida Trail in Black (not White)," 1903-1912, Journal of Florida Studies 1:9 (2021).
- "Charlotte Perkins Gilman: A Living in Periodicals," American Periodicals 30:2 (Fall 2020), 126-48.
- "Illustrated Periodicals," The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture, Volume 5: US Popular Print Culture to 1860, edited by Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 327-44.
- “’The Women of Florida are All Wide Awake’: the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs (NACWC) in the Sunshine State, 1897-1930, Florida Historical Quarterly 98:1 (Summer 2019), 23-45.
- "Daring Domesticity and Dazzling Danger: Florida's Leisure Literature for Women and Youths," 1890-1920, Journal of Florida Studies 1:8 (December 2019), 1-18.