Sarah Lawrence Celebrates Arnold Krupat and Native American Literature

For those of you interested in Native American culture and literature, you may want to head down to this Friday, Apr. 20 for a special event.

A Symposium on Native American studies in honor of retiring faculty member Arnold Krupat, a renowned authority on Native American literature, will be held in the Esther Raushenbush Library at Sarah Lawrence College.

The symposium “The Turn to the Native” will include two sessions featuring a group of international scholars, each presenting current research in the field.

For more than two decades Dr. Krupat's scholarship has been central to the development of Native American Studies and his numerous publications have in particular shaped many people's understanding of Native American literatures of the United States.

This year will see the publication of his latest book, That People Might Live, a study of Native American elegy, as he retires from teaching. A reception in honor of Dr. Krupat will conclude the day's events.

Dean Jerrilynn Dodds noted that “we at Sarah Lawrence College are enormously proud to have had in our community a scholar whose powerful work has transformed the study of Native American Literature." 

The first session, beginning at 10 a.m. includes:

• Patricia Hilden,  University of California, Berkeley: “Carceral Spaces: From Praying Towns to Prisons.”

• Shari Huhndorf,  University of California, Berkeley: “Contested Images, Contested Lands: The Politics of Space in Louise Erdrich’s Tracks and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Sacred Water.”

• Virginia Kennedy Cornell University: “Gardens, Lakes, and Travel Tales: Leslie Silko, Margaret Fuller, and the Possibility of Cosmopolitan Ecology.”

• David Murray,  University of Nottingham, England: “Texts and More: Arnold Krupat’s Contributions to Native Studies.”

The second session begins at 2 p.m. and includes the following presentations:

• Peter Whitely,  American Museum of Natural History, Columbia University, and The City University of New York: “Chief Seattle and His Speech: Further Ethnohistorical Traces.”

• Michael Elliott,  Emory University: “Alternate Histories and the Political Fantastic.”

• Shamoon Zamir, New York University Abu Dhabi: “Portraits of the Artist: Edward S. Curtis’s The North American Indian.”

• Harald Gaski, University of Tromso, Norway: “My Home is My Heart and It Migrates with Me: A Comparative Look at the Indigenous Sami Multimedia Artist Nils-Aslak Valkeapää.”