UT Professor Tackles Sordid Tale of 1880s Dismemberment

[three_fourth padding=”0 0px 0 0px”]UT Professor Tackles Sordid Tale of 1880s Dismemberment
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University of Texas professor Kali Nicole Gross has a homicidal maniac as her muse — and that led her to write “Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso: A Tale of Race, Sex, and Violence in America.”

[dropcap]Gross[/dropcap], a professor of African and African Diaspora Studies, came across the story of Tabbs while writing her 2006 book, “Colored Amazons: Crime, Violence, and Black Women in the City of Brotherly Love, 1880-1910,” which reconstructs black women’s crimes and how they were covered in the press. The book also explores how the ambitions and frustrations of marginalized women played into the commission of these crimes.

“As soon as I read about the Tabbs case, I knew it deserved its own monograph,” she says. “I had a little bit about it in my first book, but I always knew this story deserved its own book. I was enthralled the minute I laid eyes on some of the newspaper coverage.”

As Gross puts it, Tabbs “was very good at being very bad.”

Gross says she didn’t set out to focus on crime when she was going to graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania. The native New Yorker says she “was going to look into black women’s entrepreneurship, black women with hair salons and other businesses. … But I had a passion for social justice and didn’t want to be removed from social concerns. So some friends and I volunteered to teach a four-hour seminar once a week at the State Correctional Institution in Muncy, three hours outside Philadelphia.” [mc4wp_form id=”6042″][/three_fourth]

Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso. Kali Nicole Gross

Hannah Mary Tabbs

Kali Nicole Gross. Professor of African American Studies at Wesleyan University (Photo by Ryan S. Miller)