Monica Nelson Book Talk

Monica Nelson and Caitlin Philippo will discuss Nelson's new book These Long Shadows. A stunning and deeply researched inquiry on the homes of iconic Southern women, from Nina Simone to Flannery O'Connor In These Long Shadows, 14 personal, working, and domestic spaces of distinguished women are the framework for this exploration of public history in the American South. The entries are arranged chronologically and comprise artists Elisabet Ney and Clementine Hunter; musician Nina Simone; authors Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, and Margaret Mitchell; poet Anne Spencer; activists Pauli Murray and Ida B. Wells; architect Amaza Lee Meredith; Girl Scouts founder Juliet Gordon Low; socialites Julia Nutt and Emily Inman; and plantation owner Adelicia Acklen. Covering a period of 186 years, the book's chapters include original photography, first-person research, and archival material to illuminate these women's legacies. It examines what we experience when we visit house museums and provokes questions about authority, the archive, and how the past is written about today. Though women are underrepresented in the historical narrative, there are women behind every preservation movement, and white women, specifically, had a great hand in spinning some of the mythology integral to the United States. Monica Nelson is the author of Edible Flowers: How, Why, and When We Eat Flowers (Monacelli, 2021), These Long Shadows: Women's House Museums in the American South (Atelier Èditions, 2026), Antiques Today (Princeton Architectural Press, 2027), and is the founding photo and design director of Wilder Quarterly. She writes about history through material culture, design and nature. Caitlin Philippo is a Savannah-based investigative reporter. She has a background as a writer, archivist and investigative researcher.