Elise Lemire

Visiting Scholar, Transcendentalism Initiative
Elise Lemire smiling into the camera
elise.lemire@purchase.edu

Elise Lemire is Professor Emerit of English and Global Literatures at Purchase College, SUNY. Her research focuses on race, memory, and memorialization in the northeastern United States, with particular attention to Concord, Massachusetts, the shared birthplace of the nation and Henry David Thoreau.

Lemire is the author of "Miscegenation": Making Race in America (2002), Black Walden: Slavery and Its Aftermath in Concord, Massachusetts (2009), and Battleground Vietnam: The 1971 March on Lexington, Concord, and Boston (2021), all published by the University of Pennsylvania Press. She was recently awarded the Walter Harding Distinguished Achievement Award by the Thoreau Society. Her current work focuses on collaborating with community stakeholders in Concord to make Black and veteran histories more visible.