At a young age I was drawn to stories about the past. Washington Irving set his “Legend of Sleepy Hollow” in my childhood town. I immersed myself in these stories and in visits to historic sites. These sites often stood on unceded Lenape land and were worked by enslaved Africans, but that wasn’t the history commonly told at the time.

Today, I am a Professor of English and American Studies at Princeton University, which occupies the ancestral land of the Lenape and has historical ties to the institution of slavery. Here, colonial America is also visibly present. Our main administration building, Nassau Hall, dates to 1757. One of my favorite early American authors, Jonathan Edwards, is buried in the Princeton Cemetery. Lenape history still remains a much-silenced story of the land beneath my feet. Edwards’s remains are memorialized while traces of the Lenape are materially effaced.  

My current research and teaching strives to recover voices, lands, and stories of the past that have been erased or obscured by settler colonialism. I seek to understand how settler, African American, and Indigenous histories intersected and to do the necessary reparative work around the violence of the past. I have received the Old Dominion Professorship for 2023-2024 and I plan to use this research time to support my work on a forthcoming book, “Raven’s Land: Placing the Indigenous Northwest Pacific in American Literature,” which focuses on the literary symbol of the raven in the Judeo-Christian tradition and Tlingit and Haida literatures of the Northwest Pacific. Raven stories invoke an alternative meta-narrative of American history that links myth time to secular history, past to present and future, and humans to post-human possibilities including new forms of kinship and other-than-human relationships.

One of my previous books, The Science of the Soul in New England (2011), forced me to think deeply about historiography—the history of writing that shaped my field—and also about the stories that are told about the past to make sense of who we are today. A subsequent book, Unscripted America: Indigenous Languages and the Origins of a Literary Nation (2017), uncovered a vast colonial archive of Native American language texts that were written and recorded by European missionaries and Native American translators. This book shows how these language texts shaped American religious and Enlightenment history, leaving a lasting mark on the formation of US literary culture. I have also published essays, reviews, and articles on a range of topics including religion, witchcraft, the Enlightenment, and colonial-Indigenous encounters.