English Showalter
My blogs
| Gender | Male |
|---|---|
| Industry | Education |
| Occupation | retired professor |
| Location | Chevy Chase, Maryland, United States |
| Introduction | I am a retired professor of French at Rutgers University, specializing in eighteenth-century literature. I now live near Washington, DC, and spend a lot of time in London, England. I was born in Roanoke, Virginia, and grew up there. Both of my parents spent their adult lives in Roanoke, and many of my ancestors lived in the area since the 1700s. My mother, Jean (Staples) Showalter, was an ardent supporter of historical preservation and study. She and her cousin, William Watts, gave a large collection of family papers to the Historical Society of Western Virginia. Thanks largely to the initiative of William Watts’s daughters, the HSWV has undertaken to scan these, and many other, documents, so as to make them accessible online. I have been contributing to this effort, and this blog will be devoted to discussing questions about this work and about the stories that emerge from the documents. |