Scott Manning Stevens

Assistant Professor
Adjunct Professor of American Studies

433 Clemens Hall
716-645-2575 ext. 1030
Email: smsteven@buffalo.edu

Having grown up in upstate New York and as a member of the St. Regis Mohawk Tribe I was pleased to return to the northeast after beginning my teaching career at Arizona State University. There I was an Assistant Professor of English and an Instructor in the American Indian Studies Program between 1997-2000. I received my A.B. in English from Dartmouth College and my A.M. and Ph.D. from Harvard University. My dissertation focused on the early modern discourse of subjectivity as it developed in the essayistic traditions of Montaigne and Bacon. A portion of that study was devoted to essayistic writing on the New World and its inhabitants-which has in turn led me to the current path that my work is taking.

In 2000-2001 I was a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. There I began research for a book on the Literature of the Encounter. In this work I trace the formation of the image of North America and its Native inhabitants in a wide range of works including travel literature, poetry, essays, proto-ethnologies, missionary accounts and the like. I hold that the representation of the Native American culture in these earliest encounter created a series of templates that would determine subsequent encounters throughout the 18th and 19th centuries and would eventually determine US Indian policy and the representational traditions that create the 'Indian' in American literature.

I have contributed a chapter entitled "Sacred Heart and Secular Brain" to the volume The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe, edited by David Hillman and Carla Mazzio (Routledge 1997). In this work I explore my interest in both early modern visual culture and religious representational modes of the 17th century. In 2001 I published "Mother Tongues and Native Voices: Linguistic Fantasies in the Age of the Encounter" in the volume entitled Telling the Stories: Essays on American Indian Literatures and Cultures, edited by Elizabeth Hoffman Nelson & Malcolm Nelson for the American Indian Studies Series published by Peter Lang. More recently I have published a chapter entitled "New World Contacts and the Trope of the 'Naked Savage'" in the volume Sensible Flesh: On Touch in Early Modern Culture, edited by Elizabeth Harvey (University of Pennsylvania Press 2003) and "Unaccommodated Man: Essaying the New World in Early Modern Europe" in Multicultural Europe and Cultural Exchange, edited by James Helfers (Brepols, 2005). I have also published on William Apess and have two articles in press; one on the artifacts collected by Lewis & Clark on their journey west and the other on the meaning of the US/Canadian border for Indigenous peoples.

Stevens is currently completing a book entitled "Indian Collectibles: Encounters, Appropriations, and Resistance in Native North America."

I regularly teach early modern travel narratives, trans-Atlantic studies, 17th century British literature, contemporary Native American literatures, as well as graduate seminars in the Literature of the Encounter and Conquest: From Columbus to Rowlandson, Contemporary Native American Poetry and Poetics, Contested Representations: Poetics & Aesthetics in the Early Stuart Court.

Visit the Early Modern Studies Website at UB.

2005 NEH Summer Institute