DR. ANNETTE KOLODNY WILL PRESENT the talk "Who Was Really Here First? Vikings, Indians, and Solving the Mystery of Minnesota's Kensington Stone" at 7:30pm on Thursday, September 26th at the Weisman Art Museum. The event is hosted by English, American Indian Studies, Anthropology, German, Scandinavian & Dutch, and History Departments. Continue reading for more info.
Kolodny's 2012 work In Search of First Contact: The Vikings of Vinland, the Peoples of Dawnland, and the Anglo-American Anxiety of Discovery (Duke UP, 2012) has been described as "a fine book that tells a compelling story about the formations of national identity in the US" (Times Higher Education): in the book, as well as the talk, she examines stories of first contact by Native, medieval Norse, and mainstream U.S. literary narratives as well as these tales' continuing impact on North American culture and society.
Kolodny's first two books are considered landmarks in the fields of eco-criticism, frontier studies, and gender studies. The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters (U North Carolina P, 1975; rpt. 1984) explores Euro-American male fantasy projections into "virgin" wildernesses. The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630-1860 (U North Carolina P, 1984), the first comprehensive study of white women's responses to the pioneering experience, analyses not only published novels, poetry, and promotional tracts but also personal letters and diaries.
Kolodny's work has been recognized by many prestigious awards including fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Rockefeller Foundation; the Florence Howe Prize for Feminist Criticism; the Honored Scholar Award from the MLA Division on Early American Literature; the Jay B. Hubbell Medal for Outstanding Lifetime Scholarly Achievement from the MLA American Literature Section; and election to lifetime membership in the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.
