DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

Biography

Kelly Wisecup is a literary and cultural historian whose work brings together early American studies, Native American and Indigenous Studies, and histories of books and archives. She is a non-Native scholar who works with contemporary Native nations and people to research, teach, and write about Indigenous literatures. Wisecup welcomes inquiries from prospective graduate students with interests in early American literatures, Indigenous literatures, Native American and Indigenous Studies, book history, archival theory, and public humanities scholarship.

Wisecup’s most recent book, Assembled for Use: Indigenous Compilation and the Archives of Early Native American Literature (Yale University Press, 2021), was awarded the 2023 Early American Literature Book Prize and 2023 St. Louis Mercantile Library Prize from the Bibliographical Society of America. In 2025-26, she is the Beatrice Shepherd Blane Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University.  While at Radcliffe, she is at researching Indigenous birchbark books made during experiences of deforestation in the Great Lakes, the books’ afterlives in conversations about woodpulp papermaking, and the contemporary Indigenous art engaging these birchbark literary histories.

Wisecup’s scholarship has been supported by fellowships from the Newberry Library, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Antiquarian Society, and the American Philosophical Society.  She served as co-director of Northwestern’s Center for Native American and Indigenous Research from 2018-2020. She was elected to the executive committee of the Society of Early Americanists and from 2025-2027 is serving as Society president.

Her research on Indigenous books extends to collaborations with tribal nations and Indigenous organizations, and she regularly participates in collaborative public humanities projects at the intersections of archives, rivers, cities, and Indigenous literatures. She is directing the Ojibwe Muzzeniegun Digital Edition Project, a collaborative project supported by a grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission.  With a project team from eight other universities and the Library of Congress, she is creating a digital edition of the 19^th century literary magazine made by the Ojibwe poet Jane Johnston Schoolcraft and her family. With support from a Humanities without Walls consortium grant, she participated in a multi-year, collaborative project on the Indigenous Mississippi (2018-2022). With support from a National Endowment for the Humanities Common Heritage Grant, she collaborated with the American Indian Center of Chicago to build the AIC Community Archives (2017-2018).  And with support from a WCAS Award, she directs Archive Chicago, an ongoing collaboration with Northwestern University undergraduate students and project advisors from Chicago’s Native American community to remap Chicago’s colonial geographic, artistic, and historical landscape.  

Areas of Teaching and Research

Early American Studies; Native American and Indigenous Studies; History of the Book; Literature & Science; Atlantic Studies

Specializations

Textual Editing, History of the Book/Material Texts, American Literature to 1900, Science, Technology & Society Studies, Digital Humanities, 18th-century & Romantic Literature, Native American & Indigenous Literature

Books

Plymouth Colony: Narratives of English Settlement and Native Resistance from the Mayflower to King Philip’s War  (co-editor, Library of America, 2022)

Assembled for Use: Indigenous Compilation and the Archives of Early Native American Literatures (Yale University Press, 2021)

“Good News from New England” by Edward Winslow: A Scholarly Edition (editor, University of Massachusetts Press, 2014)

Medical Encounters: Knowledge and Identity in Early American Literatures (University of Massachusetts Press, 2013)

Selected Essays

• “The Indigenous Nineteenth-Century: Sovereignty, Seriality, and Materiality.” Co-written with Kathryn Walkiewicz. Solicited for The New Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies, edited by Russ Castronovo and Robert S. Levine. Cambridge University Press.
• “Printing and Circulating Simon Pokagon’s The Red Man’s Rebuke and The Red Man’s Greeting.” In As Sacred to Us: Simon Pokagon’s Birch Bark Stories in Their Contexts, edited by Blaire Morseau. Michigan State University Press. 2023.
• “Entangled Archives: Cherokee Interventions in Language Collecting.”Digital Afterlives: Futures of Indigenous Archives, edited by Ivy Schweitzer and Gordon Henry. University of New England Press, 2019.
• “Completing the Turn: An Introduction to the Joint Forum on Native American and Indigenous Studies Materials and Methods.” Co-written with Alyssa Mt. Pleasant and Caroline Wigginton.  The William and Mary Quarterly 75, no. 2 (2018): 207-236 and Early American Literature 53, no. 2 (2018): 407-44.
• “‘Meteors, Ships, Etc.’: Native American Histories of Colonialism and Early American Archives.” American Literary History 30, no. 1 (2018).“Practicing Sovereignty:  Colonial Temporalities, Cherokee Justice, and the ‘Socrates’ Writings of John Ridge.” NAIS: Journal of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association 4, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 30-60.