NEH-SHARP Lecture: Indigenous Agency and Intervention in the Bibliographical Record

This talk will draw from the past thirteen years that Mike Kelly has spent building the Native American Literature Collection in the Archives & Special Collections at Amherst College, as well as current work to incorporate Indigenous knowledge into library, archives, and museum practices. The history of the Indigenous people of North America engaging directly with printing technology extends from the first presses in seventeenth-century New England to the comics, games, and more produced by the Indigenous Imagination Workshop in the twenty-first century. Kelly will demonstrate how a deep knowledge of traditional bibliography coupled with an understanding of Indigenous history results in a rich and complex understanding of this aspect of book history. At the same time, there are many ways to incorporate Indigenous methodologies and perspectives into our curatorial practices, which Kelly and his colleagues have attempted to do at Amherst. 

About the Speaker

Mike Kelly has served as the Head of the Amherst College Archives & Special Collections since 2009; prior to that time he was Curator of Books at the Fales Library & Special Collections at New York University. He received his Master’s in Library Science from the University of Texas at Austin where he spent two years as an intern at the Harry Ransom Center; he also holds an M.A. in English from the University of Virginia. In 2016, he was awarded the Reese Fellowship for American Bibliography and the History of the Book in the Americas by the Bibliographical Society of America for his work on the bibliography of Samson Occom, a member of the Mohegan tribe of Connecticut. He co-curated (with Carolyn Vega) the exhibition “I’m Nobody! Who Are You? The Life and Poetry of Emily Dickinson” at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, which ran from January through May 2017. In the summer of 2018, Mike co-taught the course H-150: A History of Native American Books & Indigenous Sovereignty in Amherst for Rare Book School and he just completed teaching the online RBS course G-90v: Indigenous Agency and Intervention in the Bibliographical Record.