In their beautifully researched study and critical edition, Nellie Arnott’s Writings on Angola, 1905–1913: Missionary Narratives Linking Africa and America (Parlor Press), authors Sarah Robbins and Ann Ellis Pullen examine in fine detail the historical record of the transnational network of literary work produced by Arnott. Tracing her legacy in the study’s third chapter, “Writing on Multiple Journeys,” the authors argue on behalf of Arnott’s capacity to create authority and celebrity as well as a sense of community among her distant readers, underscoring the powerful and influential role that missionary women’s writing (mimicking to some extent the popular genre of travel writing) played in shaping attitudes at home, not only with regard to race, but also in relation to women’s roles, place, and purpose. Robbins and Pullen display a conscientious resolve not to obscure the inherent contradictions in Arnott’s changing perspectives as they offer a historical narrative based on Arnott’s public and private texts, which also reveal the “consistent inconsistency” in her attitudes and beliefs. Details of and insights into educational practices in missionary schools, including the observation that mothers in the US appreciated the fact that their middle-class Christian children were sharing curriculum with Umbundu children in Angola, invite interesting conclusions about the transnational, transgenerational, and gendered effects of women’s work in the missionary world.

Excerpt from Teaching Transatlanticism: Resources for Teaching Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Print Culture, edited by Linda K. Hughes and Sarah R. Robbins (Edinburgh University Press, 2015)

This is a pair of excerpts from the anthology Bridging Cultures: International Women Faculty Transforming the US Academy. The book is composed of a series of memoirs by foreign-born women scholars working in various disciplines, in which they reflect on their personal experiences as foreigners in US academia. The introduction by Federica Santini, Sabine H. Smith, and Sarah R. Robbins underlines the crucially feminist nature of “standpoint epistemology”—that is, the identifying and critiquing of one’s own particular viewpoint and “positioning.” Sabine Smith’s contribution proceeds to recount her own experience as a foreign-born woman scholar, and how she both contributes to the education of her students through her understanding of her native German language and culture and is herself shaped by her position as an outsider in the United States—Smith glories in the sense of liberation her status offers her.