Sharon M. Harris is a feminist literary scholar and cultural historian, and she was the founder and first president of the Society for the Study of American Women Writers.
[4] As a key figure in the so-called "recovery" period of the 1980s and 1990s, Harris was initially known for her study of Rebecca Harding Davis, published in 1991.
[7] In her 2009 state-of-the-field essay, "'Across the gulf': working in the 'post-recovery' era," Harris suggested that feminist literary and cultural studies have not moved from a "recovery" to a "post-recovery" phase, but rather that feminist recovery work is unfolding in a "multi-phased" way.
Calling for a scholarship that bridges connections "across the gulf"—a phrase drawn from Rebecca Harding Davis's 1881 article of the same title—Harris suggests that feminist scholars continue to recover texts written by women, but that this recovery work be theorized in relation to various critical contexts, from labor to religious faith to regionalism to race.
[8] Rebecca Harding Davis: A Life Among Writers (West Virginia University Press, 2018) Dr. Mary Walker: An American Radical (Rutgers University Press, 2009) Executing Race: Early American Women’s Narratives of Race, Society, and the Law (Ohio State University Press, 2005) Rebecca Harding Davis and American Realism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991) A Feminist Reader: Feminist Thought from Sappho to Satrapi (Cambridge University Press, 2013) [with Linda K. Hughes] Rebecca Harding Davis’s Stories of the Civil War Era (University of Georgia Press, 2009) [with Robin Cadwallader] Letters and Cultural Transformations in the United States, 1760–1860 (Ashgate Publishing, 2009) [with Theresa Strouth Gaul] Mercy Otis Warren: Selected Letters (University of Georgia Press, 2009) The Awakening, by Kate Chopin (Bedford-St. Martin's, 2007) Periodical Literature in Eighteenth-Century America (University of Tennessee Press, 2004) Blue Pencils and Hidden Hands: Women Editing Periodicals, 1830–1910 (Northeastern University Press, 2004) Women’s Early American Historical Narratives (Penguin, 2003) Rebecca Harding Davis: Writing Cultural Autobiography (Vanderbilt University Press, 2001) [with Janice M. Lasseter] American Women Prose Writers, 1870–1920.