Mathelinda Nabugodi: The Trembling Hand
Scholar Mathelinda Nabugodi reflects on race, gender, and belonging in the Romantic literary archive at the NY Society Library.
Why we picked this
What happens when a Black woman reads the Romantic canon not as outsider but as intimate participant? Nabugodi's answer is one of the most original works of literary criticism in years.
Mathelinda Nabugodi presents The Trembling Hand: Reflections of a Black Woman in the Romantic Archive, a book that challenges how we read the foundational texts of English Romanticism. Rather than approaching Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley from a critical distance, Nabugodi reads them as a Black woman who has spent years inside these texts — and asks what it means to find both belonging and alienation in the same archive.
The result is part literary criticism, part memoir, part philosophical meditation on what canons do to the people who study them. Nabugodi’s prose moves between close reading and personal reflection, creating a form that mirrors the Romantic tradition she interrogates.
At the New York Society Library — one of the city’s oldest literary institutions — this is the kind of evening where the venue itself becomes part of the conversation about who archives are for.