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From the American Antiquarian Society:

Paper Relations: Histories and Futures of Indigenous Print Cultures

A Summer Seminar in the History of the Book Led by Kathryn Walkiewicz and Kelly Wisecup

American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts, 21–26 June 2026

Applications due by 3 April 2026

Cherokee Hymns (New Echota, 1833) (Worcester: American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, #226669).

What relationships are necessary to make Indigenous books? What relations are held in paper, bindings, and ink? And what relations are generated by the circulation and use of Indigenous print?

This seminar will examine Indigenous cultures of print between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. Our focus on relations extends from collaborations with publishers, patrons, and printers to considering plants, trees, animals, and rags in paper and bindings―as well as the complex connections books have to the archives where they are held. Specific topics will be driven by participants’ interests but may include periodical networks, relations between Black and Indigenous print cultures, environmental histories of the book, Indigenous language revitalization, Tribal nations’ acts of archival creation and activism, and more.

Throughout the seminar, participants will examine both conceptual and methodological questions using AAS’s vast holdings of Indigenous printed materials. Using readings drawn from Indigenous studies and history of the book scholarship, we will consider how this scholarship might be put in conversation with Indigenous peoples’ use of print and the book. Building on influential research that has recovered histories of Indigenous writing and challenged the oral-literacy binary, we will ask how Indigenous books manifest, contest, and make relations with living beings, with other books, and with communities.

Guest speakers for the seminar include Ellen Cushman (Northeastern University), David Aiona Chang (University of Minnesota Twin Cities), and Kimberly Toney (Brown University). Paper Relations coincides with the James Russell Wiggins Lecture in the History of the Book in American Culture, which will be given by Phillip Round (University of Iowa) on 24 June 2026.

Participants will be encouraged to think about how to take insights from the seminar into their own classrooms, libraries, and communities, as well as to their networks for mentoring and collegial support. Early career scholars, library and museum professionals, and Tribal staff are especially encouraged to apply.

PHBAC is committed to creating an environment that welcomes all people and meets their access needs. The AAS library and classroom facilities are wheelchair accessible. Other accommodations may be available upon advance request. Participants are encouraged to indicate any accessibility needs in their applications.

Tuition for the five-day seminar is $1000. This includes meals throughout the week and a guided field trip to the Hassanamesit Woods in Grafton, Massachusetts. Two tuition scholarships to attend the seminar are generously funded by the Bibliographical Society of America. Additional scholarships are available for students and scholars specializing in Indigenous studies, including community members or staff affiliated with Tribal organizations. See the application form for more information about scholarships to attend the seminar. The cost of housing is not included in the tuition fee. Participants will have the option of staying in dormitory housing on the Worcester Polytechnic Institute campus (within easy walking distance of AAS) for approximately $80 per night.

For questions about the seminar, please contact John J. Garcia, AAS director of scholarly programs and partnerships, at jgarcia@mwa.org. Applications can be submitted here»

Kathryn Walkiewicz (enrolled citizen, Cherokee Nation/ᏣᎳᎩᎯ ᎠᏰᎵ) is an associate professor of literature and faculty director for the Indigenous Futures Institute at the University of California, San Diego. Walkiewicz is the author of Reading Territory: Indigenous and Black Freedom, Removal, and the Nineteenth-Century State (University of North Carolina Press, 2023) and co-editor of The People Who Stayed: Southeastern Indian Writing after Removal (University of Oklahoma Press, 2010). Their research and teaching interests include Native American and Indigenous studies, print culture, early American literature and culture, nineteenth-century American studies, Southern studies, speculative fiction, and horror. Walkiewicz held an AAS-National Endowment for the Humanities Long-Term Fellowship in 2021 and was elected to AAS membership in 2022.

Kelly Wisecup is the Arthur E. Andersen Teaching and Research Professor in the Department of English at Northwestern University, where she is also an affiliate of the Center for Native American and Indigenous Research. Her research brings together early American studies, Native American and Indigenous Studies, and histories of books and archives. She is the author of Assembled for Use: Indigenous Compilation and the Archives of Early Native American Literature (Yale University Press, 2021) and is principal investigator for the Ojibwe Muzzeniegun Digital Edition Project, a project to create a collaborative digital edition of the nineteenth-century literary magazine made by the Ojibwe poet Jane Johnston Schoolcraft and her family. Wisecup was a Peterson Fellow at AAS in 2014–15 and was elected to membership in the Society in 2022.