"Sovereignty on the Page: A Birchbark Booklet & Histories of Native American Literature"

Date: 

Thursday, October 20, 2022, 5:00pm

Location: 

Boylston 110 (Fong Auditorium), 5, Harvard Yard, Cambridge, MA, United States of America, 02138

Kelly Wisecup is a literary and cultural historian whose work brings together early American studies, Native American and Indigenous Studies, and histories of books and archives. Across several books and digital projects, her research seeks to understand the many avenues through which Indigenous peoples—published authors and otherwise—created, interacted with, used, and read books, manuscripts, newspapers, and other texts.  Her recent scholarship traces relationships between 18-19th -century Indigenous literatures and colonial archives, examining how Indigenous communities made compilations, intentionally-assembled texts like recipes, scrapbooks, and lists, and how the travels of those texts into colonial archives constituted acts of anti-colonial criticism.  She is also at work on a project about 19th and 20th century Indigenous periodicals.  She teaches courses on Indigenous literatures and arts made in and about Chicago, early Native American literatures, early American literatures, and archival histories and theories.

Wisecup’s books include Assembled for Use: Indigenous Compilation and the Archives of Early Native American Literatures (Yale, 2021) and Medical Encounters: Knowledge and Identity in Early American Literatures (University of Massachusetts Press, 2013).  She is the editor of a scholarly edition of Plymouth colonist Edward Winslow’s Good News from New England (University of Massachusetts Press, 2014).  With Lisa Brooks, Wisecup co-edited Plymouth Colony: Narratives of English Settlement and Native Resistance from the Mayflower to King Philip’s War, a volume bringing together primary text accounts of Plymouth colony on Wampanoag homelands (Library of America, 2022).  She is an elected lifetime member of the American Antiquarian Society; on the board of American Literature (2020-2023); and an associate editor for The Broadview Anthology of American Literature, vol. A (2022) 

Wisecup’s scholarship has been supported by fellowships from the Newberry Library, the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Antiquarian Society, and the American Philosophical Society. She served as co-director of Northwestern’s Center for Native American and Indigenous Research from 2018-2020. From 2021-2026, she is serving on the Society of Early Americanists executive committee. 

Wisecup regularly participates in collaborative public humanities projects at the intersections of archives, rivers, cities, and Indigenous literatures.  With support from a Humanities without Walls consortium grant, she participated in a multi-year, collaborative project on the Indigenous Mississippi (2018-2022). With support from a National Endowment for the Humanities Common Heritage Grant, she collaborated with the American Indian Center of Chicago to build the AIC Community Archives (2017-2018).  And with support from a WCAS Award, she directs Archive Chicago, an ongoing collaboration with Northwestern University undergraduate students and project advisors from Chicago’s Native American community to remap Chicago’s colonial geographic, artistic, and historical landscape.