Craig Williams, "Not a Song of Golden Greek": Laura Cornelius Kellogg and Native North American Writing on Greco-Roman Antiquity

Craig Williams' talk, cosponsored by UGA's Classics Department and the Institute of Native American Studies, will focus on Laura Cornelius Kellogg and Native American Writing on Greco-Roman Antiquity. Dr. Williams' current book project, Whose Antiquity? Indigenous Writers of North America on Ancient Greece and Rome, brings together for the first time over eighty Native writers of North America who have made various uses of Greco-Roman antiquity, writing in a range of genres from the seventeenth century to today. These generations of writers have taken a variety of stances to settler-colonial culture in general and its prestigious antiquity in particular. Cumulatively and collectively, however, they have included Greece and Rome in a broad vision of human history from North American soil, with its own still-living antiquity. Many of them have invoked the prestigious “classical” antiquity of Euro-American culture precisely in order to talk back to narratives of Native barbarism or savagery, and all of them have in one way or another contributed to Native survivance. In support of this project Williams has been awarded fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Germany), the Morphomata Center for Advanced Study at the University of Cologne (Germany), the U of I Center for Advanced Study, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.