Love and Work Are the Cornerstones of Our Humanity

press release: In this in-person Humanities Without Boundaries talk, Julia Stern reflects on the significance of love and work, Freud’s indices of a life well lived, and on her teaching and scholarship over 30 years. Stern explores how her recent scholarly interests – in American and African American women’s writing from the 17th century through the 20th, classic Hollywood cinema and particularly, the films of Bette Davis – have been informed by childhood passions and the questions she raised about the world’s inequities from a very young age. Stern’s talk will attempt to demystify how a literature professor’s lived experience makes possible her humanistic research and to show that the humanities really are without borders.

Julia Stern is the Henry Sandborn Noyes Professor of Literature and the Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence at Northwestern University, where she’s taught in the English Department and the Program in American Studies since 1991. She received her B.A. from Wellesley College and her Ph.D. from Columbia University.  Stern is the author of three scholarly books, all published by the University of Chicago Press: The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel (1997), which was a finalist for the Modern Language Association’s best first book prize; Mary Chesnut’s Civil War Epic (2010); and Bette Davis Black and White (2021).

Stern is widely recognized for her teaching, having won numerous awards since the early 1990s. Interested across her career on the significance of race in American culture, she teaches a range of courses on American and African American women writers, from the late 18th-century through the mid-20th-century, Gothic, sentimental, and melodramatic fiction, the novels of Faulkner, and the films of Bette Davis.  In the coming academic year, she will begin teaching courses on race in classic Hollywood cinema.