Holly Jackson
Bernard Bailyn Editor of The New England Quarterly
Biography
Holly Jackson is the author of two books and a number of essays on 19th-century US cultural history for both scholarly and popular venues, including PMLA, the New York Times American Literature, GLQ, and the Boston Globe. Jackson is an elected member of the American Antiquarian Society and an Honorary Fellow of the Massachusetts Historical Society.
Area of Expertise
19th-century American literature and culture; American protest movements and utopian thought; the 19th-century American novel; African American studies; queer studies.
Professional Publications & Contributions
“’Strange Types of Radicalism’: Post-Woke Politics in The Bostonians,” Henry James Review 48.1
(March 2027).
“No Shackles, No Gallows, No Government: Antebellum Prison Abolition and Anarchist
Non-Resistance,” American Quarterly 78.4 (December 2026).
“Ethan Frome’s Poly Pessimism: Anarchist Non-Monogamy and the Question of Care,” GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies 30.4 (2024): 391–408.
“Emerson and the Socialists: American Renaissance in the Age of Fourier,” Oxford Handbook of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Christopher Hanlon (Oxford UP, 2024): 296-312.
“Garrisonian Sex Radicalism: Antislavery and the Free-Love Heresy.” Massachusetts Historical Review Special Issue 1 (December 2023).
“Introduction: On the Histories and Futures of Black New England Studies,” co-authored with Kerri Greenidge. “Revisiting Black Boston,” a special issue of The New England Quarterly co-edited with Kerri Greenidge (June 2022).
“All the World Will Burn: William Miller and the Roots of Eco-Millenarianism,” The Panorama: Expansive Views from The Journal of the Early American Republic (website), 30 May 2023.
“Slavery Was a War.” Interview with Vincent Brown. Boston Globe, 20 May 2020.
"The Transformation of American Family Property in The House of Seven Gables." Critical Edition of The House of Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ed. Robert Levine. Norton (2020): 399-41
American Radicals: How 19th-Century Protest Shaped the Nation(Crown/Penguin Random House 2019)
“Boston’s Forgotten Fight against Slavery: It’s Time for a Historical Marker at the Site of a Pivotal Protest.” Boston Globe, 24 November 2019.
“Beyond Suffrage: It’s Time to Fight for the Original and Unfulfilled Goals of the Women’s Movement.” Washington Post, 17 October 2019.
“What Next? Expanding the Radical Promise of the American Revolution” October 10, 2019 Laphams Quarterly Online
“Coming Out of the World: The 19th-Century Activist Tactic that Queers Should Reclaim (Again).” Public Seminar, 24 June 2019.
Co-Organizer with Nadia Nurhussein, “Early Black Utopias” symposium, Johns Hopkins University, Center for Africana Studies, March 29, 2019
“How to Protest the 4th of July." New York Times, July 3, 2018
“Bring Back Election Day: America’s First Holiday Was About More Than Voting.” Washington Post, October 22, 2018
“The Radicals’ Reconstruction: Jewett at Port Royal.” J19: The Journal of 19th-Century Americanists 6.2. (November 2018).
"The Marriage Trap in the Free-Love Novel and Queer Critique." American Literature 87.4 (December 2015): 681-708. (Winner of the Norman Foerster Prize)
American Blood: The Ends of the Family in American Literature, 1850-1900. Oxford University Press, 2014.
“Another Long Bridge: Reproduction and Reversion in Pauline Hopkins’s Hagar’s Daughter.” Early African American Print Culture. Eds. Lara Langer Cohen and Jordan Stein. University of Pennsylvania Press (2012): 192-202.
“The Transformation of American Family Property in The House of the Seven Gables.” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 56:3(September 2010)“‘So We Die before Our Own Eyes’: Willful Sterility in The Country of the Pointed Firs.” The New England Quarterly 82.2 (June 2009): 264-284.
“Identifying Emma Dunham Kelley: Rethinking Race and Authorship.” PMLA 122 (May 2007): 728-741. (Winner of the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association 2008 Article Prize)
Additional Information
Selected Awards and Honors
2026 American Antiquarian Society, Kate B. and Hall J. Peterson Fellow
2026 New England Regional Consortium Fellowship
2025 Elected Honorary Fellow of the Massachusetts Historical Society
2022 Elected to Membership in the American Antiquarian Society
2020 Massachusetts Book Awards, Non-fiction Honoree
2020 Finalist for the Julia Ward Howe Award for Nonfiction, Boston Author’s Club
2019 Smithsonian, Ten Best History Books of the Year
2019 The Advocate, Best Non-Fiction Books of the Year
2015 Norman Foerster Prize for the best essay of the year published in American Literature
2007 Nineteenth-Century Studies Association Article Prize