Lisa Unger Baskin, "Phillis Wheatley Peters, Poems on Various Subjects Religious and Moral, A Metamorphosis: How I Learned to Love My Copy"
I will speak about a copy of Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects Religious and Moral (London, 1773), which was in my collection and is now at Duke. I will use the images to discuss this particular copy of the Poems, how my response changed, and how I ultimately understood the physical condition of this copy.
Lisa Unger Baskin is an historian, curator, editor and political activist. An intense collector for the past 50 years, she voraciously acquired books, manuscripts, ephemera, objects and photographs documenting women and work. In 2015 the collection was acquired by the David M. Rubenstein Library at Duke University. On the cusp of the pandemic Lisa Unger Baskin co-curated 500 Years of Women’s Work at both Duke and the Grolier Club. She continues to build her collection and community through her activism. She serves on the board of the David Ruggles Center for History & Education in Florence, Massachusetts, is an active member of the Grolier Club and the American Antiquarian Society; for a number of years she has taught at CABS, the Colorado/Minnesota Antiquarian Book Seminar, where she established the Belle da Costa Greene and the David Ruggles Scholarships. Co-chair of the Western Massachusetts Rainbow Coalition, she was elected a Jesse Jackson delegate to the 1988 Democratic National Convention.
