Michelle Burnham
Santa Clara University
Michelle Burnham is Professor of English at Santa Clara University. She is currently completing a book, The Revolutionary Pacific: Transoceanic American Writing and the Calculus of Risk. She is the author of Folded Selves: Colonial New England Writing in the World System and Captivity and Sentiment: Cultural Exchange in American Literature, 1681-1865. She is also editor of A Separate Star: Selected Writings of Helen Hunt Jackson and co-editor of a new edition of The Female American. She is interested in transoceanic studies, literary recovery, feminist studies, studies of the novel, and Native American studies.
What counts as early, and what counts as American? How do our answers to these questions influence our scholarly and pedagogical labors along with the broader structure of our scholarly field (or fields)?
This roundtable will be the second of two thematically linked conversations that will occur at separate conferences: the 2017 biennial meeting of the Society of Early Americanists in Tulsa, OK, and the 2018 biennial meeting of C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists in Albuquerque, NM.
Our project in hosting this conversation is to bring together scholars whose engagements with early American studies occur through quite different positionings of their work in time, discipline or institution, and place. We aim for a current assessment of the state of the field of "early" American studies by asking whether what we all study constitutes one field and, if so, what the outlines of that field are. Of particular interest to us is how spatial and chronological categories and modes of inquiry bear upon each other, as well as how institutional and professionalizing pressures are shaping the field.
Early American studies has become a larger, more vibrant, and more diverse field of study over each of the preceding four decades. Part of this increase in intellectual intensity, density, and range results from a broader conceptualization of “America” beyond the bounds of nation. So expansive have been recent understandings of the terms “America” and “American” through transatlantic, transnational, hemispheric, and global paradigms that the more useful question might be: what topics and interrogations fall outside the boundaries of this field? We are interested in the theoretical, methodological, and institutional implications of more elastic notions of place and space for our approaches to periodization. Worth considering also is how traditional sorts of periodization, often Eurocentric or nationally based (antebellum, pre-columbian, early republic, Enlightenment, golden age…), serve to anchor — for better or for worse — more innovative or elastic approaches to space. In studies of intercultural interaction, how are self-identified early Americanists these days approaching the task of reconciling how different peoples categorize time? We are also interested in whether current critical approaches to temporality might reconfigure our sense of indigeneity and studies of settler colonialism.
Each roundtable participant will speak for 5-7 minutes before opening up to broader discussion.
