The Canterbury Academy, started by white educator and Abolitionist Prudence Crandall (1803-1890), provided the highest level of education available to women at the time, to African-American women from across the Northeast. The controversies, legal wrangling, and vigilante violence against the Academy’s inhabitants and very existence, proved a pivotal moment in the struggle against slavery and racism in the United States. Jennifer Rycenga, author of a recent ground-breaking book on the subject, demonstrates how intersectional the Academy was, and the lessons it provides for our time, when women, people of color, and education itself are beleaguered.
Bio: Jennifer Rycenga, author of Schooling the Nation: The Success of the Canterbury Female Academy (University of Illinois Press, 2025), is Professor Emerita in the Humanities Department at San José State University. Her scholarly work has focused on the Abolitionist movement, exploring areas previously hidden or marginalized, such as Black women’s activities and voices, the anti-racist work of white Abolitionists, and networks of families and friends involved in the struggles against slavery and injustice. In addition to her work on the Canterbury school controversy, she has led two Digital Humanities projects on the Burleigh family of Plainfield, Connecticut – seven siblings who all supported Prudence Crandall and the Canterbury school, and philosophic analyses of the work of Black speaker Maria Stewart (1803-1879).
Rycenga’s other work ranges widely across feminist musicology (co-editor with Sheila Whiteley of Queering the Popular Pitch, Routledge 2006), global feminism (Frontline Feminisms, co-edited with Marguerite Waller, Routledge 2001), and lesbian philosophy (The Mary Daly Reader, co-edited with Linda Barufaldi, New York University Press, 2017). Her next major work will examine the convergence of justice, history, and the natural world.
Jennifer Rycenga lives in Rochester, New York with her wife Peggy Macres, an elderly yet spry Shitzu-Poodle, Patsy Cline, and two highly-contented cats, Lyssa (Greek; Bringer of Chaos) and Ipo (Hawaiian; sweetheart).
