Join us for two lunchtime talks.

Bringing Edward S. Curtis and ‘The North American Indian’ into focus

For a little over a century, critics and collectors alike accused Edward S. Curtis of staging and romanticising his photographic images of the North American Indian. Donna Morrow shares stories about Curtis and his travels, explains where these images reside and what Native Americans think of his work today, and talks about the descendants of some of the people he photographed as well as Curtis’ own family.

Tractable Conversations: Indigenous Language Lists in Early Modern Texts

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, European writers mapped the world through text, producing a wealth of letters, narratives, and diaries. They also began to map the linguistic world, with travellers producing language lists which transliterated Indigenous languages into European alphabets for dissemination. Emily Stevenson examines examples of early modern North American Indigenous language lists to consider both the role that they played as ideological tools in the colonisation of North America, and how they simultaneously used Indigeneity to create stable concepts of European nationhood.

Donna Morrow
Donna Morrow is a leading authority on the works of Edward S. Curtis and his magnum opus The North American Indian.

Emily Stevenson
Emily Stevenson is a literary historian who is interested in how people wrote about and encountered their world in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.