Noted Scholar of American Literature to Lecture at TU Sept. 23 on 19th-Century Anti-Polygamy "Sex Panic"

Thursday, September 12, 2002

Noted Americanist Bruce Burgett, associate professor of American studies at the University of Washington, Bothell, will give a lecture on the campaign against Mormon polygamy that was carried out in 19th -century American literary and political writing at 4 p.m. Monday, Sept. 23, in the McFarlin Library Faculty Study at The University of Tulsa. The lecture, which is free and open to the public, is titled “Manifest Sexuality; or, The Race for the Southwest.”

Burgett’s talk will focus. The anti-polygamist "sex panic" was so widespread that more than 80 anti-Mormon novels were published between 1850 and 1900 and sloganeering against the twin evils of “slavery and polygamy” became a regular strategy in electoral politics. As with today’s so-called “defense of marriage” campaigns, Burgett argues, the nineteenth-century anti-polygamy movement imagined itself as a battle for home and nation, waged against the forces of barbarism that threatened to invade the borders of both of these “domestic” territories.

Burgett is the author of “Sentimental Bodies: Sex, Gender, and Citizenship in the Early Republic” and has published widely on early American literature and cultural theory. He is currently working on a book titled “American Sex: Cultures of Sexual Reform in the Antebellum United States.”

For more information, contact the TU English department at (918) 631-2237.