The School of English and Theatre Studies, the Department of History, and the College of Arts will host Jace Weaver’s public talk, “Shakespeare Among the Salvages” on Thursday, November 12^th at 4:00 p.m. in Massey Hall, Room 100 (Lower Massey). He will be introduced by Thomas King. All are invited.

Jace Weaver (Cherokee) is Director of the Institute of Native American Studies, Franklin Professor of Native American Studies and Religion, and Adjunct Professor of Law at the University of Georgia. He holds two doctorates, a J.D. from Columbia Law School of Columbia University and a Ph.D. from Union Theological Seminary in New York.

Dr. Weaver’s work in Native American Studies is highly interdisciplinary, though focusing primarily on three areas: religious traditions, literature, and law. He is the author or editor of a dozen books, including That the People Might Live: Native American Literatures and Native American Community, Other Words: American Indian Literature, Law, and Culture, Turtle Goes to War: Of Military Commissions, the Constitution and American Indian Memory, and Notes from a Miner’s Canary: Essays on the State of Native America.

In 2003, Dr. Weaver won the Wordcraft Award for Best Creative Non-Fiction from the Wordcraft Circle of Native American Writers for Other Words. In 1999, he won the Portfolio Award for excellence in teaching resources from the journal Media and Methods for his book on CD-ROM, American Journey: The Native American Experience. He has also been nominated for the Oklahoma and Connecticut Book Awards. American Indian Literary Nationalism, written with Robert Warrior, Craig Womack, and Simon Ortiz, won the 2007 Bea Medicine Award for best book in American Indian Studies from the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies and the Native American Literature Symposium.

In Other Words, Dr. Weaver has written, “Native American Studies is by its nature two things, comparative and interdisciplinary.” His most recent work, published in 2014, is The Red Atlantic: American Indigenes and the Making of the Modern World, 1000-1927. The Red Atlantic, Jace Weaver’s sweeping and highly readable survey of history and literature, synthesizes scholarship to place indigenous people of the Americas at the center of our understanding of the Atlantic world. Weaver illuminates their willing and unwilling travels through the region, revealing how they changed the course of world history.

Indigenous Americans, Weaver shows, crossed the Atlantic as royal dignitaries, diplomats, slaves, laborers, soldiers, performers, and tourists. And they carried resources and knowledge that shaped world civilization–from chocolate, tobacco, and potatoes to terrace farming and suspension bridges. Weaver makes clear that indigenous travelers were cosmopolitan agents of international change whose engagement with other societies gave them the tools to advocate for their own sovereignty even as it was challenged by colonialism.

Reviews of The Red Atlantic

“In this fascinating, well-written account that places Native people at the center of Atlantic world history, Weaver positions the Atlantic as a conduit not only for the physical movement of people and ideas, but also as a highway for connections between cultures. . . . Highly recommended.”
–Choice

“The Red Atlantic is an original, learned, and comparative historical narrative of transatlantic cultures and nations. Jace Weaver considers the significance of the cultural exchange, political ideas, literature, technology, and material trade with Native American Indians, or the historical and cultural transatlantic significance of the Red Atlantic. He has written an extraordinary and comprehensive comparative history of Native American Indians in the Red Atlantic, and his discussions of the subject will surely inspire and influence future students, research, and writing on the subject.”
–Gerald Vizenor, University of California, Berkeley

“Following in the wake of Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic, this book re-visions the Atlantic as Native space. Indians inhabited an Atlantic world and participated in the multiple lanes of exchange that developed following Columbus’s voyages. Native foods, technologies, and ideas traveled to Europe; Native people traveled to Europe (sometimes more than once) as captives and slaves, as soldiers and sailors, as diplomats, and occasionally as celebrities. And writers, both Native and non-Native, created a fictional literature of the Red Atlantic. An important and stimulating book.”
–Colin G. Calloway, Dartmouth College

Jace Weaver poster