About Summer Scholars Lunchtime Talks
Join us for two lunchtime talks.
Bringing Edward S. Curtis and 'The North American Indian' into focus
For a little over a century, critics and collectors alike accused Edward S. Curtis of staging and romanticising his photographic images of the North American Indian. Donna Morrow shares stories about Curtis and his travels, explains where these images reside and what Native Americans think of his work today, and talks about the descendants of some of the people he photographed as well as Curtis’ own family.
Tractable Conversations: Indigenous Language Lists in Early Modern Texts
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, European writers mapped the world through text, producing a wealth of letters, narratives, and diaries. They also began to map the linguistic world, with travellers producing language lists which transliterated Indigenous languages into European alphabets for dissemination. Emily Stevenson examines examples of early modern North American Indigenous language lists to consider both the role that they played as ideological tools in the colonisation of North America, and how they simultaneously used Indigeneity to create stable concepts of European nationhood.
Donna Morrow
Donna Morrow is a leading authority on the works of Edward S. Curtis and his magnum opus The North American Indian.
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Giving daily talks at The Rainbow Man in Santa Fe, New Mexico about The North American Indian while surrounded by the largest retail setting of Curtis’ work in the world, Donna shares Curtis’ photographic techniques, as well as stories about his work and personal life. She recently stepped down from the board of directors of The Curtis Legacy Foundation but continues to elevate Curtis’ legacy from historical obscurity to a celebrated cornerstone of American photographic and cultural history.
Emily Stevenson
Emily Stevenson is a literary historian who is interested in how people wrote about and encountered their world in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
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Her research to date has primarily focused on travel writing, examining both literary and historical texts alongside material history to consider how and why people travelled in the period. She has worked as a Lecturer for various universities across the UK and is currently working on a collaborative project run between the University of Oxford, the Ashmolean Museum and the National Trust, examining the significance of carpets in early modern culture. She is a 2026 Eccles Institute Visting Fellow.
About the Summer Scholars Lunchtime Talks
The Summer Scholars season of lunchtime talks is hosted by the Eccles Institute for the Americas and Oceania at the Library and showcases the exciting and wide-ranging research into our Americas collections by the Institute’s Visiting Fellows and associates, as well as Library staff.
About the Eccles Institute
The Eccles Institute builds, curates and preserves the Americas and Oceania contemporary collection at the Library and champions knowledge and understanding of these regions through a rich programme of fellowships and awards, cultural events, research training, guides to the collections and initiatives for schools.
For more information about the Institute and our collections, visit our webpage or contact eccles-institute@bl.uk. To see more events relating to the Eccles Institute, visit our events page.
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Fatherhood and colonial power in Jamaica, and Chinese Labour in the British Caribbean.
Ideas in Motion: Early Modern Circulations of Thought through Theatre, Translation and Print
Perspectives on performance and print culture.