Jodi Byrd is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma and Associate Professor of American Indian Studies and English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her articles have appeared in American Indian Quarterly, Cultural Studies Review and Interventions and she is the author of The Transit of Empire (University of Minnesota Press, 2011).
Margery Fee, is Professor of English at the University of British Columbia. She teaches feminist science fiction, science and technology studies and Indigenous literatures in the Department of the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. In 2008, she was Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the Peter Wall Institute of Advanced Studies, writing about how some discourses of genetics/genomics contribute to the racialization of minority groups, particularly Indigenous people. Her most recent publications deal with Aboriginal foodways, the “Trickster” and cultural appropriation, Daniel Coleman’s White Civility and decolonizing the orality/literacy divide. Her current research project is Literary Land Clams: The “Indian Land Question” from Pontiac’s War to Oka, which examines how land ownership figures in the work of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, including John Richardson, E. Pauline Johnson, Archibald Belaney (Grey Owl), Louis Riel, and Harry Robinson. She is currently, with collaborators Daniel Heath Justice and Deanna Reder, working on a digital project called “Paper Speaking: Indigenous Publication in Northern British North America and Canada from the Beginnings to 1992 (see the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory), and, with Dory Nason co-editing an E. Pauline Johnson / Tekahionwake reader.
Sarah Klotz received her PhD in English from the University of California, Davis in September. She currently works as adjunct faculty at Butte College in California’s North Valley. Her book project, Sentimental Literacies: Grief, Writing, and American Indigenous Rights focuses on nineteenth-century American semiotics of land marking in indigenous and Euro-American idioms and how these sign systems overlap through discourses of mourning. Her next project examines English-only writing pedagogy at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School and reads Native student writing for traces of rhetorical sovereignty in the face of postbellum assimilationist education. Her work can be found in ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, Mississippi Quarterly, Composition Studies, and the edited collection Transatlantic Women: Nineteenth-Century American Women Writers and Great Britain.
Laura Mielke, (Associate Professor, University of Kansas) is the author of Native Acts: Indian Performance, 1603-1832. Edited with Joshua David Bellin. Afterword by Philip J. Deloria. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2011. Moving Encounters: Sympathy and the Indian Question in Antebellum Literature (U Massachusetts P, 2008), co-winner of the 2009 Byron Caldwell Smith Book Award and a 2009 Choice “Outstanding Academic Title” Her essays have appeared in American Indian Quarterly, Legacy, MELUS, Journal of American Drama and Theatre, and American Literature. She is currently at work on a monograph titled Provocative Eloquence: Theatre, Oratory, and Collective Violence in America, 1820-1860.
Phillip Round, Professor of English and American Indian and Native Studies at the University of Iowa, where he coordinated the American Indian and Native Studies program for several years. His latest book, Removable Type: Histories of the Book in Indian Country, 1663-1880 (UNC Press, 2010), was awarded the Modern Language Association’s James Russell Lowell Prize in 2011. In 2013, he received a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship to support research for his new book on collaborative practices in early Native literature.
Session Organizer: Augusta Rohrbach (augustarohrbach@gmail.com)
was an Associate Professor at Washington State University and Editor of ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance until 2014. She is the author of Truth Stranger than Fiction: Race, Realism and the US Literary Marketplace (Palgrave, 2002), completed while a Bunting Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Research. Her latest project, Thinking Outside the Book: 19th Century Women Writers and the U.S. Literary Marketplace (UMass P, 2014) uses 19th century literary history to engage 21st century theories of the book and of literacy generally. With Carol Batker, she is one of the editors of a special issue on pedagogy for American Literature. Her essays have appeared in American Literature, Callaloo, New England Quarterly, Pedagogy, Prospects as well as several collections. Currently she is at work on “The Gallows Diary of Mary Surratt, Presidential Assassin,” a study that theorizes new formations and uses of the digital archive. She is on the Graduate Committee on Education for ASA and the current chair of the MLA Executive Committee for the Division on 19th Century American Literature.