Critic, historian, and author, Joanna Scutts’ book Hotbed: Bohemian Greenwich Village and the Secret Club that Sparked Modern Feminism reveals the lost history of Heterodoxy, a secret feminist debate club that met in Greenwich village in the early 1900s. The women who called themselves members were instigators, dreamers, and radicals bound together and divided by causes that are still contentious today. The author joins Artist-in-Residence Jessica Campbell to discuss their shared pursuit of hidden histories to inspire contemporary discourse.
Organized in conjunction with Jessica Campbell: Heterodoxy and in partnership with The Free Library of Philadelphia.
Jessica Campbell is a multidisciplinary artist and author working in comics, fibers, painting, drawing, and performance. Drawing on a wide range of influences, including science fiction, art world politics, and her evangelical upbringing, Campbell explores ways to reflect heterogeneity through a combination of disparate media, subjects, and tone. Whether through cartoony depictions or the use of unorthodox material, her work often wields humor as a device to help one come to terms with its darker subject matter.
Joanna Scutts is a literary critic, cultural historian, and the author of Hotbed: Bohemian Greenwich Village and the Secret Club that Sparked Modern Feminism (Seal Press/Hachette USA and Duckworth Books UK, 2022) and The Extra Woman: How Marjorie Hillis Led a Generation of Women to Live Alone and Like It (Liveright/W.W. Norton, 2017.) Her book reviews and essays have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Guardian, and New Yorker online, among many others, and she is a current board member of the National Book Critics Circle. Originally from London, Joanna received her BA from King’s College, Cambridge and PhD from Columbia University. She now lives in Paris with her husband and son.
