SEMINAR DIRECTOR, DAVID KAZANJIAN

David Kazanjian received his PhD from the Rhetoric Department at the University of California, Berkeley, his M.A. in Critical Theory from the University of Sussex, and his B.A. in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University.   His area of specialization is transnational American literary and historical studies through the nineteenth century.  His additional fields of research are political philosophy, continental philosophy, Latin American studies (especially nineteenth-century Mexico), colonial discourse studies, and Armenian diaspora studies.

His book The Colonizing Trick: National Culture and Imperial Citizenship in Early America (Minnesota) offers a comparative study of colonial and antebellum, racial and national formations, and a critique of the formal egalitarianism that animated early U.S. citizenship. He has co-edited (with David L. Eng) Loss: The Politics of Mourning (California), as well as (with Shay Brawn, Bonnie Dow, Lisa Maria Hogeland, Mary Klages, Deb Meem, and Rhonda Pettit) The Aunt Lute Anthology of U.S. Women Writers, Volume One: Seventeenth through Nineteenth Centuries (Aunt Lute Books). He He has also published widely on the cultural politics of the North American-Armenian diaspora, and has participated in the Blind Dates Project (www.blinddatesproject.org), an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural collaboration among contemporary artists and intellectuals with ties to the legacies of the Ottoman Empire, curated by Defne Ayas and Neery Melkonian. He is currently completing The Brink of Freedom: Improvising Life in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World, a study of two nineteenth-century social movements (immigration to Liberia and the Caste  War of Yucatán) that improvised with liberal discursive practices of freedom.

Contact Information:
kazanjia@english.upenn.edu
Fisher-Bennett Hall 214
215-746-3768

Seminar Co-organizer and Richard S. Dunn Director of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies

Daniel K. Richter is Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of American History and the Richard S. Dunn Director of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. His research and teaching focus on Colonial North America and on Native American history before 1800. He holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University and taught previously at Dickinson College and the University of East Anglia. His most recent publication is Before the Revolution: America’s Ancient Pasts (Harvard University Press, 2011). His first book, The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization (University of North Carolina Press, 1992), won the 1993 Frederick Jackson Turner Award, Organization of American Historians and the 1993 Ray Allen Billington Prize, Organization of American Historians, and was selected a 1994 Choice Outstanding Academic Book. His Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Harvard University Press 2001) won the 2001-02 Louis Gottschalk Prize in Eighteenth-Century History and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Richter is also co-editor (with James Merrell) of Beyond the Covenant Chain: The Iroquois and their Neighbors in Indian North America, 1600-1800 (Penn State University Press, 2003) and (with William Pencak) Friends and Enemies in Penn's Woods: Indians, Colonists, and the Racial Construction of Pennsylvania (Penn State University Press, 2004).