Amy Gore is the recipient of two major awards to support her dissertation research: the UNM-NCAIS 2016 Spring Graduate Student Workshop in Research Methods Fellowship, and a Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia Scholarship.
The first award comes from the Newberry Consortium in American Indian Studies (NCAIS), formed by the prestigious Newberry Library in Chicago. The University of New Mexico joined NCAIS in 2010 as one of twenty international institutions noted for their dedication to American Indian Studies. As a member of the consortium, UNM may send one graduate student to the NCAIS to its annual workshops and seminars. UNM students from participating departments may apply, including Native American Studies, American Studies, Anthropology, English, College of Fine Arts, History, Linguistics, the Law School, and University Libraries, and a committee of UNM faculty members selected Amy as the recipient of this year’s fellowship.
This spring’s workshop is titled “The ‘Textual Continuum’: Media and Method in Native Archives,” and will be led by Dr. Margery Fee and Dr. Phillip Round, the latter of whom won the MLA’s James Russell Lowell Prize for his monograph, Removable Type: Histories of the Book in Indian Country (UNC Press, 2010). The workshop aims to move beyond the longstanding scholarly obsession with writing to examine how Native people used a variety of media to disseminate their perspectives, and it will draw on the Newberry Library’s unsurpassed collection of Native American materials to offer students hands-on implementation of the newest interpretive methodologies in Indigenous media studies.
While attending the workshop, Amy plans to develop theoretical connections between image and text in Indigenous nonfiction as a foundational framework for her dissertation. She will examine original editions of Mohegan author Samson Occom’s A Sermon Preached at the Execution of Moses Paul, first published in 1772, and she will also begin comparative research on the mastheads in nineteenth-century Indigenous periodicals. The unparalleled Edward E. Ayer Collection at the Newberry Library contains several original reprints of Occom’s A Sermon, one of the few libraries in the world to house more than one edition of this rare book. The Ayer Collection also maintains a wide variety of rare Indigenous newspapers and other periodicals.
Amy’s second award, Bibliographical Society of the University of Virginia Scholarship, comes from the Rare Book School (RBS), a prestigious training and research organization based in Charlottesville, VA. This scholarship covers full tuition for one RBS course. Amy will gain additional training in history of the book and print culture through this course, and she intends to focus specifically on typography, illustrations, and the history of aesthetic design within Indigenous book production.
These awards continue Amy’s training in archival research. Last summer she was the recipient of the Elizabeth and George Arms Research Grant, a competitive English department travel award that supported archival research with the Ann S. Stephens and Beadle Dime Novel Collection at the New York Public Library and the New York Historical Society. This research marked the beginning of a recovery project for Stephens as a socially and politically important nineteenth-century female writer.
