About Summer Scholars Lunchtime Talks
Join us for two lunchtime talks.
Clean Clothes and Fossil Fuels
Fossil fuels radically changed Americans' laundry habits between the 1920s and the 1970s. Automatic washing machines, tumble dryers, and synthetic detergents made from petroleum enabled a single worker to produce clean, dry clothes within a few hours. Yet electric appliances required oil rigs and coal mines, and the new detergents produced foaming rivers and toxic algae blooms. Julia Guarneri discusses the environmental trade-offs involved in ‘labour-saving’ laundry technologies and explores how manufacturers and utility companies pushed Americans towards ever-higher resource use.
Curating Toni Morrison's Random House List
In the late 1960s and 1970s, Toni Morrison was a senior trade editor at Random House. During her time there she commissioned around fifty titles, many of which were landmark publications in their day such as fiction and memoir by African American women, the autobiographies of Angela Davis, Muhmmad Ali and Huey P. Newton, archival scrapbooks of African American history, literary anthologies of Black writing and more. Tessa Roynon describes her forthcoming project at the Library to curate a unique collection of these highly significant and beautiful books.
Julia Guarneri
Julia Guarneri is Associate Professor of History at the University of Cambridge, UK.
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Her focus is US history from the late nineteenth century onwards, particularly the history of media, consumption, and everyday life. Her current book project chronicles everyday practices of cleaning and cleanliness in the twentieth-century United States. She is a 2026 Eccles Institute Visiting Fellow.
Tessa Roynon
Tessa Roynon is an independent scholar and librarian, and a 2026 Eccles Institute Visiting Fellow.
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Her publications in the fields of American literature and classical reception studies include the prize-winning monograph, Toni Morrison and the Classical Tradition, The Cambridge Introduction to Toni Morrison, and The Classical Tradition in Modern American Fiction. She is currently developing a specialism in the history of modern rare books of the African diaspora.
About the Summer Scholars Lunchtime Talks
The Summer Scholars season of lunchtime talks is hosted by the Eccles Institute for the Americas and Oceania at the Library and showcases the exciting and wide-ranging research into our Americas collections by the Institute’s Visiting Fellows and associates, as well as Library staff.
About the Eccles Institute
The Eccles Institute builds, curates and preserves the Americas and Oceania contemporary collection at the Library and champions knowledge and understanding of these regions through a rich programme of fellowships and awards, cultural events, research training, guides to the collections and initiatives for schools.
For more information about the Institute and our collections, visit our webpage or contact eccles-institute@bl.uk. To see more events relating to the Eccles Institute, visit our events page.
