Protest on the Page: Print as an Affordance for Revolutionary Spirits (RBS-Mellon Lecture)

Date: 25 October 2017
Time: 4:30 p.m.
Location: Boncheck College House, Franklin & Marshall College
Presented by: The Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in Critical Bibliography at Rare Book School and the Department of Religious Studies at Franklin & Marshall College

Considering two early-twentieth century instances of print culture on the northwest coast, this lecture explores the ways the printed page can serve as an affordance for cycles of public and political appeal and remembrance. Juxtaposing the anti-colonial uses of a missionary printing press by Nisga’a printers with the marginalia in an Archbishop’s library of texts on psychic research, I show the changing meanings of the revolutionary spirit in a land of contested sovereignties.

Pamela Klassen is Professor in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto. She currently holds the Anneliese Maier Research Award from the Humboldt Foundation, in support of a five-year collaborative project entitled “Religion and Public Memory in Multicultural Societies,” undertaken together with Prof. Dr. Monique Scheer of the University of Tübingen. Her writings include Blessed Events: Religion and Home Birth in America(Princeton University Press, 2001) and Spirits of Protestantism: Medicine, Healing, and Liberal Christianity (University of California Press, 2011). She has two books forthcoming with the University of Chicago Press: The Story of Radio Mind: A Missionary’s Journey on Indigenous Land, and Ekklesia: Three Inquiries in Church and State, co-authored with Paul Christopher Johnson and Winnifred Fallers Sullivan.

Listen to an audio recording of this lecture.