SEA Featured Scholar, June 2025: Bradley Dubos
How did you become interested in studying early American literature?
I was trained as a high school English teacher and at that time was drawn mainly to Renaissance juggernauts like Dickinson, Poe, Hawthorne, and Whitman. As an unseasoned teacher I found it easier to get students excited about discussing a “The Tell-Tale Heart” or an “I heard a Fly buzz – when I died” than a “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” or a Federalist Paper. It was only after I reached graduate school that I really began to appreciate the complexity of those earlier works and the range of textual practices and literary traditions encompassed by what we call “early American literature.”
I trace this shift to two formative seminars I took with Betsy Erkkila and Kelly Wisecup, both incredible teachers and mentors. Betsy Erkkila’s “Founding Terrors” course centered the life and poetry of Phillis Wheatley Peters (by now a classic gateway into early Americanism), which opened up the Revolutionary moment for me in ways that continue to orient my work. Kelly Wisecup’s seminar on Native American and Indigenous cultures of print raised new questions for me about non-alphabetic textualities and Indigenous authors’ creative engagement with print technologies. It ultimately set me on a path to incorporating Indigenous studies methods into my research and sparked my interest in public humanities work that spotlights the contemporary significance of early American texts.
Who is your favorite early American writer, or what is your favorite early American text, and why?
Jane Johnston Schoolcraft! Her life, along with hers and her family’s groundbreaking literary contributions, are endlessly fascinating to me—a fascination I owe largely to Robert Dale Parker’s and Maureen Konkle’s invaluable recovery work. From her careful attention to Ojibwe and settler paradigms for perceiving and communicating with the natural world, to her innovative work with Anishinaabemowin and English translation, to her prescient insights into the ecological consequences of settler colonialism, Johnston Schoolcraft gifted us with a rich body of poems and stories deserving of the growing recognition they are receiving in the field. Her poems are also prime texts for practicing close reading with students while complicating a New England-centric canon. The two versions of her poem “The Contrast” are especially teachable texts that can help get students thinking critically about revision and form.
What are you currently working on?
I’m currently on a research fellowship and dedicating my time to my book manuscript, which studies how Black and Indigenous poets reshaped America’s religious landscapes during the revivals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. At the moment I’m drafting a chapter about three Native poets who were involved in late-nineteenth-century debates on allotment policy in Indian Territory: Too-Qua-Stee/DeWitt Clinton Duncan (Cherokee), James Roane Gregory (Yuchi/Creek), and Alexander Posey (Creek). I’m curious about the relationship between what might be called the aesthetics of allotment and the aesthetic strategies deployed by these authors—in other words, how they used poetic form to respond to historical processes of allotting Native territories during the Dawes Act era. I have also been at work on a shorter essay about a quirky 1844 manuscript poem that Brothertown Narragansett writer Thomas Commuck sent to a US Congressman staking a claim to ancestral land. It’s one of only two extant poems I am aware of by Commuck, offering an intriguing example of how Native authors turn lyric poetry toward surprising ends.
What is something you are reading right now (EAL related or otherwise) that inspires you, either personally or professionally?
Right now I’m revisiting Rebecca Pelky’s (Brothertown Indian Nation) brilliant poetry collection Through a Red Place (2021). My scholarship is interested in the continuity of Brothertown Indian poetic practices over time, and Pelky’s book skillfully illustrates how Brothertown authors continue to use poetry to explore history, genealogy, language, and connections to homelands, in the process assembling a counternarrative against settler colonial projects of Native (and specifically Brothertown) erasure. Pelky’s attention to mounds in Ohio and Wisconsin is also helping me think through the interconnections among Indigenous earthworks throughout the Midwest. Having recently moved to Columbus, fewer than forty miles from the Newark Earthworks (part of the larger Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks series of complexes recently designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site), these local sites layered with Indigenous history, science, art, and communal placemaking are at the top of my mind.
Is there a scholar in the field who inspires you, and why?
So many remarkable scholars working in Native American and Indigenous studies have inspired me immensely! I will cheat just a little here and name Lisa Brooks, Christine DeLucia, Mishuana Goeman, Tiffany King, Kathryn Walkiewicz, Caroline Wigginton, and Kelly Wisecup as particularly strong role models. Some of these scholars work outside of early American studies, but they all offer inspiring models for thinking expansively about Indigenous pasts, presents, and futures that have deeply shaped my own reading practices.
Bradley Dubos is an Assistant Professor of English at The Ohio State University.