Talks

Margaret (Peggy) Pickett is an independent researcher, author and living history presenter. In addition to developing and presenting history programs for schools, she has researched and created programs in which she portrays women of the past. Her current portrayals include Eliza Lucas Pinckney, Dorothy Sinkler Richardson and Rebecca Motte. She is the co-author of The European Struggle to Settle North America 1521 – 1608 and the author of Eliza Lucas Pinckney Colonial Plantation Manager and Mother of American Patriots, 1722 – 1793. Her latest book Rebecca Brewton Motte American Patriot and Successful Rice Planter, 1737 – 1815 was published in 2022.

Timothy Helwig is Professor of English at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina where he teaches courses in nineteenth-century and working-class American literature. His book Cross-Racial Class Protest in Antebellum American Literature, which examines formal and thematic connections between sensational fiction and African American literature of the 1840s and 1850s, was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in 2020. His scholarly articles have appeared in American Studies, American Periodicals and Cambridge University Press’s A History of American Crime Fiction and Whiteness in American Literature and Culture. He has held visiting research fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society and the Library Company of Philadelphia, and he has been teaching Poe’s stories, poems and lone novel since he started graduate school in 1995.