Corresponding with Quakers

Corresponding with Quakers is an ongoing, collaborative research project investigating the Ballitore Collection held at UCSB Library’s Special Research Collections and the Shackleton Correspondence collection held at the Huntington Library. The Ballitore Collection features more than 2,500 documents related to the Irish Quaker community of Ballitore, Ireland, including letters, journals, notebooks, and dream accounts, while the Shackleton Correspondence includes about 400 letters. Originally assembled by the author Mary Leadbeater (1758-1826), these unique, understudied collections offer important insights into the intersection of gender, race, and religion in this period. The project, with funding from the UC-HBCU Initiative, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies, seeks to investigate and document the collections and in doing so to shed light on the transatlantic development of abolitionist thought, women’s writing, and communal religious practices. We are in the process of digitizing the collections for public access as well as computational analysis.