Abstract: How were Native American women represented in popular nineteenth-century American literature? What influence did such representations have on later popular media? How might book history relate to other media and forms of production? Dr. Adams-Campbell discusses her recent research on NIU’s dime novel collections and considers how and why we should attend to popular literature, book history, and Native American writers.
About the Presenter: Melissa Adams-Campbell is Associate Professor of English at Northern Illinois University where she teaches and researches on Early American, Native American, Black Atlantic and women writers. She is the author of New World Courtships: Transatlantic Alternatives to Companionate Marriage (Dartmouth, 2015), which was part of the "Re-Mapping the Transnational" series in American Studies at Dartmouth. Adams-Campbell has published work in book collections and journals such as: Transatlantic Literature and Transitivity, Migration and Modernities, Settler Colonial Studies, Studies in American Fiction, Teaching American Literature and others. Her research has been supported by the National Endowment of the Humanities, NIU's Schriber Fellowship for the Study of Women's Literature and Language, the Horatio Alger Society, and a summer research grant from NIU.
About the Presenters: Jeffrey Einboden is Presidential Research, Scholarship and Artistry Professor at Northern Illinois University, and prior Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Council of Learned Societies. A specialist in the literatures and languages of early America and the Middle East, Einboden is author of several monographs, including, most recently, Jefferson’s Muslim Fugitives: The Lost Story of Enslaved Africans, their Arabic Letters, and an American President (Oxford University Press 2020).
Kerry Burch is a Dekalb native who attended the NIU Laboratory School in its final years. Burch received a BA in Sociology from the University of San Francisco and an MA in History from Columbia University Teachers College (NYC). He taught high school history for 7 years before receiving a Ph. D. in Political Science from the University of Hawaii-Manoa. He has taught at NIU since 2000.
Burch's major research interests are located at the intersections of democracy and education. He teaches courses in the Philosophy of Education, History of United States Education, Education for Social Justice, and American Educational Thought. The major intellectual influences on his teaching and research endeavors are traced to Socrates/Plato, Paulo Freire and John Dewey
Abstract: Northern Illinois University’s Rare Books and Special Collections contains medieval manuscript leaves that allow students to engage with medieval scribal traditions. Within the collection, one 13th century French bible leaf contains a historiated initial of an uncertain identity; perhaps the figure is Solomon, perhaps Ecclesia. The flourishing book trade of medieval Paris allowed this researcher to interpret the possible identity of the figure portrayed in the decorative initial by studying other Parisian bibles as well contemporary iconography used to represent Solomon and Ecclesia. While the identity of the NIU medieval leaf’s figure is still not definitively determined, these sources offer us possible explanations of who may be represented.
About the Presenter: John Hosta is a graduate student in the M.A. program in Art History, with special interests in medieval art and the history of printmaking. Currently an intern at the NIU Museum, he has also participated in an internship at the Elmhurst History Museum and assisted Prof. Catherine Raymond, both as a volunteer and as a graduate assistant, with work on NIU’s Burma Art Collection. After he graduates, he hopes to pursue a career in the museum field.
Abstract: The Gramatica y diccionarios de la lengua tupi ó Guaraní is a single-volume, partial reprint of a Spanish-Guaraní grammar, dictionary, and catechism originally published by Antonio Ruíz de Montoya in Madrid in 1639. As a seventeenth-century Jesuit missionary working with Guaraní mission Indians, Ruíz de Montoya’s linguistic study spanned the region of colonial Río de la Plata, a territory that is now divided between the nation states of Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, and western Brazil. The imprint is important not only for its elucidation of classical Guaraní, but also because it reveals a great deal about the native population and Jesuit project of Christianization during the colonial period. Unlike other conversion efforts in Spanish America, Jesuits established a rigorously-individualizing process designed to produce Christian thinking and subject formation among Guaraní neophytes. Linguistic evidence from the dictionary documents how Jesuits engaged mission residents in Christian modes of thinking, by providing colloquies, contemplations, and other spiritual exercises that urged Guaraní neophytes to reproduce Christian tenets in their own idiom, thoughts, and words. Although archival documents and seventeenth-century publications reveal how Jesuits were successful, the Ruíz de Montoya vocabulary also provides linguistic evidence of how Jesuit efforts were complicated by a long-standing Guaraní oral-prophetic tradition that reframed knowledge of the soul and other religious principles in ways that were uniquely indigenous and Guaraní. My presentation examines this Guaraní prophetic tradition as it emerged in the practical context of Christian instruction and was later documented in the Jesuit catechism and dictionary.
