Join GradFUTURES, Princeton Area Alumni, and Princeton University Press for a GradShares event at Reunions 2024!

GradShares are talks by current Princeton Ph.D. candidates about their research, targeted at Princeton Alumni, part of the the alumni/University partnership for lifelong alumni learning.

Dianna Little (PhD student, English) will give a talk entitled: "Romantic Rocks, Indigenous Traces: Poetry, Geology, and Empire in Early America"

How did geology dictate America's expansion westward throughout the nineteenth century? How did rocks prophesy Manifest Destiny, and how did indigenous peoples resist such prophecies? This talk will explore these questions through two writers who had tremendous agency over the colonial, industrial, and literary development of the Great Lakes region in the early nineteenth century: the geologist Henry Rowe Schoolcraft and the Ojibwe poet Jane Johnston Schoolcraft. Through their literary partnership, both writers excavate from the geology of Lake Superior complex stories of indigenous-settler relations, early American copper mining, and Ojibwe sovereignty. Rocks, they reveal, foretell the future of the nation, and indigenous peoples' precarious positions within it.