About

New Directions in Indigenous Book History

About the Event

After the ten-year anniversary of Phillip Round’s Removable Type: Histories of the Book in Indian Country, 1663–1880 (2010) and at the twentieth anniversary of Louise Erdrich’s Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country (2003), we invite the general public to join us in a two-day, virtual symposium in which national and international scholars will offer analyses, reflections, and provocations on the material book’s historical and continuing relation to Indigenous peoples and communities. We will also take the occasion to mark the flourishing—though still nascent—field of scholarship on the materialities of the Indigenous book and the productive interventions such scholarship has made into the traditionally settler-oriented fields of bibliography, scholarly editing, and book history.

Registration is free and open to the public. Seven panels of scholars and Indigenous community members, and one keynote panel, will be held on Thursday, March 23rd and Friday, March 24th, 2023. Live captioning services will be provided.

Dr. Dan Radus

Dan Radus is Assistant Professor of English and the coordinator of the Native American Studies Program at SUNY Cortland. He specializes in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Indigenous literatures in North America, with particular interests in Indigenous historical writing, book history, print culture, and materialism. His current project, "Indigenizing the Book," considers a series of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century books that have been inscribed, embellished, or otherwise altered by Indigenous readers, writers, and artists.

Radus is a Junior Fellow in the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography at Rare Book School, University of Virginia, and his scholarship has been supported by fellowships at the American Antiquarian Society and the Newberry Library. His work has been published in American Literature, Studies in American Indian Literatures, and Early American Literature.

At Cortland, Radus teaches courses in the Indigenous literatures of North America as well as in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American literatures. He is the recipient of two college-wide awards for teaching: the Tenure-Track Excellence in Teaching Award (2020) and the Steven J. Barnes Outstanding Faculty Member Award (2021).

Dr. Amy Gore

Amy Gore’s scholarship and teaching specializes in early Indigenous and American literatures, with interests in book history, gothic literature, body studies, and the recovery of marginalized women and Native American writers. Her degrees include a B.A. in English (Eastern University, PA), an M.A. in Native American Studies (Montana State University, MT), an M.A. in English (Bread Loaf School of English, Middlebury College, VT), and a Ph.D. in English (University of New Mexico, NM).

Her forthcoming book, titled Book Anatomy: Body Politics and Materiality in Indigenous Book History (University of Massachusetts Press, 2023), theorizes the material relationships between books and bodies in nineteenth-century Indigenous literary history to claim the book itself as a form of embodied power relations. She has also begun archival research on a second book project on the literary recovery of nineteenth-century woman writer Ann S. Stephens. Her most recent articles appear in Studies in American Indian Literature, Pedagogy, and Western American Literature.

Currently, she teaches courses in early American literature and multi-ethnic writing. She serves on the executive committee for the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (MELUS) and on the editorial board for Studies in American Indian Literatures (SAIL). She has been inducted into the Andrew W. Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography, and her awards include the Center for Regional Studies Hector Torres Fellowship, the Emerging Scholars Professional Development Fellowship from the Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures (ASAIL), the Bibliographic Society for the University of Virginia Scholarship, the Elisabeth and George Arms Research Grant, and the Vogel Award in Teaching Excellence.