It's one of the last places you'd expect to find a literary theorist trained in New Criticism. Frances Smith Foster, Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and Women's Studies, has been spending time in the history archives. Says Foster: "I'm interested in what domestic life was like during slavery. I'm looking at nineteenth-century newspapers, magazines, and letters written by African Americans in the years leading up to the American Civil War."

Foster advocates "new wave scholarship" that cuts across traditional humanities and social science fields. Her interdisciplinary approach has yielded a discovery about domestic life in antebellum North America. Foster has found that nineteenth-century African Americans enjoyed resilient and steadfast conceptions of love, marriage, and the family. She has shown, for example, that antebellum wedding vows displayed a level of commitment exceeding today's standards. Husbands and wives pledged fidelity not only 'till death,' but also 'through death.' For them, marriage lasted beyond the grave - and love endured into the next life.

For Foster, retrieving such expressions addresses historical misconceptions. When they are published next year, her two volumes, Love and Marriage in Early African America (UPNE) and Til Death or Distance Do Us Part: Marriage, Family and (Sexual) Morality in African America (OUP) will challenge those who say that the institution of slavery shattered African American domestic life.

As a Senior Fellow at the Center for the Study of Law and Religion (CSLR) at Emory, Foster contributes to the policy debate over "post-traumatic slavery syndrome," a theory about the long-term consequences of slavery for African American identity and social relations. Foster does not deny that slavery destroyed some nineteenth-century families or that its legacy continues to make itself felt. She simply observes that to overlook the positive dimensions of love and family life during slavery leaves an incomplete portrait. "There is very little evidence in antebellum African American literature to support the post-traumatic slavery syndrome narrative," she says. "At the very least, the version of history described or assumed in the contemporary theories is complicated by antebelleum African American print culture." Attending to the positive dimensions of nineteenth-century domestic life, she argues, can encourage and empower contemporary families and policymakers.

While chairing the English Department and serving as an associated faculty in African American Studies, Foster is working on additional projects. One is a co-edited volume that serves as a follow-up to But Some of Us Are Brave (1982), a ground-breaking work that set the agenda for black women's studies. The other is a project on feminist sexual ethics organized at Brandeis University. Together with legal scholars, sociologists, theologians, and linguists, Foster is studying the sexual implications of slavery from Greco-Roman times through the present. Working in a multi-disciplinary setting has sharpened her scholarship. "When you're working with legal theorists, sociologists, theologians, and linguists, the first thing you have to do is learn to talk with one another," she says. Such conversations enable scholars to find answers that might not be obvious from a single disciplinary perspective.

Foster brings the same collaborative spirit to her work with students. Each year she volunteers to sponsor a post-doctoral fellow from a visiting university. After Hurricane Katrina, she shared office space with a post-doc from Tulane. Foster sees such sponsorships as one way to encourage intellectual community. She sees her work with undergraduates as another. "It was a culture shock, at first," she says of her decision to return to teaching freshman seminars. "But now I love it."

One of Foster's favorite undergraduate courses is "On Becoming a Woman." First-year students learn research, communication, and critical thinking skills while exploring what it means to be defined as - or to define oneself as - a woman. They read Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Dorothy Allison's Bastard out of Carolina. The students make research trips to grocery and drug stores, where they observe how the 'men's section' and the 'women's section' shape understandings of sex and gender. The students interview women of different cultures and ages. The class is so much fun, Foster confesses, that she finds it hard to say goodbye at the end of the semester.

She also credits her students with helping inspire future research projects. In coming years, Foster hopes to conduct a study of Afro-Canadian literature. She also plans to write about literary societies, or what she calls the "Oprah phenomenon." Book clubs are becoming more popular even as scholars complain that no one reads any more, Foster says. She thinks academics are too quick to dismiss popular literature and the people who read it. "Some of the most important and difficult social issues are discussed in popular fiction," she says. "But it's done in such a way that makes it easy to swallow."

Where her own reading habits are concerned, Foster prefers detective novels. "I might be a trained literary theorist, but when I get on a plane, I still carry my Marcia Muller and Eleanor Taylor Bland novels," she says. She enjoys trying to solve the cases alongside the fictional detective. That same curiosity - an enduring fascination with how the story comes together - animates and motivates Foster's commitment to interdisciplinary scholarship.