Dear SSAWW Members

Our next meeting of the Washington Area Group for Print Culture Studies 2023-2024 series will take place virtually on Friday, March 1st, from 3:30 to 5:00 p.m. (EST) via Zoom. Dr. Carolyn Sorisio will deliver a talk titled “Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins and Sagebrush Journalism.”

Zoom link: https://wcupa.zoom.us/j/92049110061?pwd=bjU5SU5FYzJncmhDMUVCbGJjQnBmUT09

Abstract

Carolyn Sorisio will describe the Northern Paiute author and activist Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins’s negotiation of Nevada’s late nineteenth-century sagebrush journalism. This was the first print culture that Winnemucca encountered. Although she was at times subjected to its harsher features, she also became adept at cultivating coverage from this powerful and precarious newspaper culture. By understanding Winnemucca’s later work—notably her 1882 essay “The Pah-Utes” (published in The Californian) and 1883 Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (written and published in Boston)—as a response in part to the sagebrush school, we can better understand how Winnemucca used different print cultures to appeal to readers and advocate for change.

Biography

Professor Sorisio specializes in nineteenth-century US literature. Her recent work focuses on the Native American author and activist Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins and includes The Newspaper Warrior: Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins’s Campaign for American Indian Rights [coedited with Cari M. Carpenter (Univ. of Nebraska P, 2015)], as well as essays on Winnemucca in Studies in American Indian Literatures, MELUS, and J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists. She is the former editor of College Literature: A Journal of Critical Literary Studies, and she has guest edited special issues ofESQ and MELUS. Her earlier work includes Fleshing Out America: Race, Gender and the Politics of the Body in American Literature, 1833-1879 (Georgia UP, 2002) and essays in the African American Review and Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers.

Please join us for Dr. Sorisio’s talk and discussion afterwards. 

For further information, consult the Washington Area Group for Print Culture Studies website at http://wagpcs.wordpress.com/, or contact Sabrina Baron and Eleanor Shevlin (eshevlin@wcupa.edu).

For their encouragement and support, the Washington Area Group for Print Culture Studies would like to thank Stephanie Stillo, Chief of the Rare Book and Special Collections at the Library of Congress, and other Library of Congress staff including Michael North, Head, Reference and Reader Services, Rare Book and Special Collections, and Eric Frazier, Reference Librarian Rare Book and Special Collections. We are also indebted to John Y. Cole,  retired Library of Congress Historian and founder of the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress, and Mark Dimunation, the now retired Chief of the Rare Book and Special Collections at the Library of Congress who have supported WAGPCS over the years.