Talking English and American Literature Seminar: “A Born Writer”: Juanita Harrison and her Beautiful World, 1887-1967

Cathryn Halverson is visiting Fulbright Chair at SINAS and Associate Professor of World Cultures and Languages at Minot State University, North Dakota. She was formerly an associate professor of English and American Studies at Kobe City University of Foreign Studies, Japan, and the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and is the author of three monographs on women’s life narratives of the American West, most recently Faraway Women and the Atlantic Monthly  (UP Massachusetts, 2019). 

The subject of the seminar is her work in progress, a biography of Juanita Harrison. Harrison was an African American world traveler from Mississippi whose memoir, My Great, Wide, Beautiful World, became one of the bestsellers of 1936. She left her home state as a young woman to take a series of service jobs across the United States, Canada, and Cuba. Thereafter she embarked on an around-the-world journey, traveling for eight years in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia while intermittently working as a maid, cook, or nurse. Following the publication of her book, she settled in Hawaii, Argentina, and then Hawaii again.

Halverson will focus on methodological issues as well as Harrison’s relationship to her American identity, as expressed in My Great, Wide, Beautiful World. Material for the seminar will be distributed a week in advance.

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