Department of English

• Monday, April 21, 2025 - 5:15pm to 7:00pm

Class of 1978 Pavilion, sixth floor of the Van Pelt-Dietrich Library

This seminar roundtable brings together scholars whose work explores Native American book history. Based on the research and conversations initiated by the presenters in their chapters in American Contact: Objects of Intercultural Encounters and the Boundaries of Book History (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024), co-edited by Rhae Lynn Barnes and Glenda Goodman, this roundtable will address the ways Indigenous peoples in the Americas created and engaged with inscriptive and textual practices. We will also discuss the interventions and propositions forwarded by the edited volume, which argues for understanding diverse material texts, including environmental inscriptions, as crucial sites of intercultural encounter, bearing layers of legibility and illegibility. The volume moves beyond alphabetic communication to consider multisensory forms of knowledge transmission, including oral and aural practices, and presents an American book history that is hemispheric in scope and an expansive definition of “book.”

The roundtable is led by Glenda Goodman (University of Pennsylvania) and Rhae Lynn Barnes (Princeton University). Participants include Rachel Brown (Haskell Indian Nations University), Marlena Cravens (Drexel University), John Pollack (University of Pennsylvania), Daniel Radus (State University of New York, Cortland), Amy Kuʻuleialoha Stillman (University of Michigan), and Germaine Warkentin (University of Toronto).