Elizabethtown College Assistant Professor of English Literature, Dr. Patrick Allen, has recently had his work appear in various scholarly publications.
Dr. Allen’s works are featured in the 2023 publications of “African American Activism and Political Engagement: An Encyclopedia of Empowerment,” and “Abortion in Popular Culture: A Call to Action.”
Dr. Patrick Allen
Published in June 2023, “African American Activism and Political Engagement,” is a series of seven long-form essays on various aspects of Black political involvement and empowerment, followed by an encyclopedia that contains approximately 200 accredited entries on a variety of subjects related to African American political activism. The publication will feature Dr. Allen’s encyclopedia entries on the following: “Black World/Negro Digest”; “Sharecropping”; and “Walter White.”
“The encyclopedia entries are aimed at a student audience—high schoolers and college undergraduates—and help achieve the critical work of introducing young people to important figures, events, publications, and other topics related to African American histories,” Dr. Allen said.
The book, “Abortion in Popular Culture: A Call to Action” was originally published in April of this year and brings together scholars who examine depictions of abortion in film, television, literature, and social media. Dr. Allen’s contribution to the work is an analytic essay titled “‘I gave her life’: Black Women, Abortion, and Healing in Brit Bennett’s ‘The Mothers.’”
“Black women’s voices and stories are too often obscured or erased in discussions about healthcare and reproduction, so I hope the chapter will draw readers to Bennett’s novel and to the historical and contemporary contexts regarding race and abortion that are essential to gaining a fuller picture of reproductive rights, narratives, access, and care in the US,” Dr. Allen said.
About Dr. Patrick Allen
Dr. Allen specializes in African American literatures, multiethnic American literatures, critical race studies, Black feminisms, medical and health humanities, and graphic medicine. He has published on nineteenth-century Black medical women’s writing as well as forced sterilization in the context of Toni Morrison’s novel Home.
