The History of the Book: Associate Professor Melissa Adams-Campbell

“Representing Native American Women in Popular Literature: Tiger Lilly and other Women Warriors” presented by Associate Professor Melissa Adams-Campbell.

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 Seminar Series: The History of the Book Seminar Series is an interdisciplinary realm of study that includes printing and publishing, materials and technologies of the book, the book trade, reading and readers, and collectors and collections, as well as library and information history. The field is focused on human behavior, as well as material culture, and draws on the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. In short, it is an interdisciplinary field which interrogates and celebrates the materials that created our universities and that our universities create.  

In Fall 2022, NIU’s Rare Book Room will inaugurate its History of the Book Seminar—a multidisciplinary colloquy in which NIU faculty and students can explore this rich and growing field together. From time to time, we hope the seminar will highlight Rare Book and Special Collections materials. However, that consideration is less important than creating a vigorous interdisciplinary site of exploration of the book and the material foundations of the intellectual world the university rests upon.