SEA Featured Scholar, March 2026: Anthony Trujillo
How did you become interested in studying early American literature/culture?
I grew up in one of the Native Pueblos in Northern New Mexico on the site of an old Pueblo village turned Spanish settlement that was razed during the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. I used to wonder about the fragmentary motifs in the pottery shards and obsidian pieces strewn around our yard and packed into the bricks of our adobe house. They had something to do with me, but what and how? Fast forward (a lot) to my first semester in Divinity School: I took a course in which I was introduced to the writings of Samson Occom. I knew very little about the Native Northeast and had never heard of Occom. His writings both inspired and confused me. What was this guy up to? I wrote my first grad school paper on his hymns and hymnal and, surprisingly given my doubt about my research and writing chops, I felt like I wanted to dig in deeper. These topics of cosmology and aesthetics seemed to matter both in the Native Northeast, in the Pueblo Southwest. So I kept going …
Who is your favorite early American writer, or what is your favorite early American text, and why?
My first impulse is to channel my dad and say that my favorite early American writer is the ancestor who wrote all those stories on the boulders on Black Mesa near our house. Those are the first American novels up there! Sticking with the theme of Indigenous imagination, another of many favorite early American texts and writers is William Apess and his sermon The Increase of the Kingdom of Christ (1831), to which he adds the essay, Indians, The Ten Lost Tribes. In this, Apess not only “sees the wager” of white Christians – on the missionary project and the question of Indian origins, respectively – but goes all in with both, which leads him to make startlingly brilliant, outlandish and saucy claims. Is he conjuring the prophet Jeremiah or the apostle Paul, responding to Joseph Smith or anticipating Martin Luther King? To me this shows an Indigenous person’s skill not only in lambasting settler Christian hypocrisy, but in thinking imaginatively into and through settler discourses and cosmology to reconfigure the world.
What are you currently working on?
I’m up to my eyebrows in dissertation writing which asks: what comes into view when we attend to the “theologies” (broadly conceived) that underscore world-making projects – Indigenous, colonial, anti-colonial? In what modes are these expressed? I ask these questions by considering one publication, The Experiences of Five Christian Indians, published by William Apess in 1833. Comprised of the testimonies of the titular five Pequot people – mostly women and all living in Pequot homelands in southeastern Connecticut in the first decades of the nineteenth century despite literally being written out of history – I’m suggesting that their testimonies not only elucidate two centuries of settler violence and Indigenous vitality but trace a genealogy of Indigenous women’s authority and animate Pequot presence and futurity through their enactments of theological and aesthetic power. All of that packed into a the so-called “conversion narrative” genre with some of the testimonies only being a few pages long. I’ve got my work cut out for me.
What is something you are reading right now (early American or otherwise) that inspires you, either personally or professionally?
One exciting book I’m still in the middle of reading is Ryan Carr’s, Samson Occom: Radical Hospitality in the Native Northeast (2023). Carr attends to the powerful current of theology running through Occom’s writings. In this, he does something that Occom may have greatly desired: he takes the Mohegan minister seriously as a theologian with a theology as defined and distinct as any of his New Light contemporaries. This book is a reminder that to miss Occom’s theology is to miss Occom. As someone whose dissertation is focused on Native Christians, it is both inspiring and, I think, field calibrating to have someone make this case so pointedly and then to proceed with identifying a set of theological concepts that are key to better understanding Occom’s politics, relationships, and literary works. This book makes me wonder what a “theological turn” in Native American literary studies might look like.
Is there a scholar in the field who inspires you, and why?
If scholarship were Olympic figuring skating, and research brilliance, lyrical writing voice, extravagant generosity and matchless humor were the marks of stardom, Hilary Wyss would, in my view, warrant the title “quad god.” I got to know Hilary during a gap year in Hartford before I applied to Ph.D. programs when my academic prospects were nebulous at best. She treated me like a colleague, like a person whose presence and thoughts mattered. She has not only helped orient me to the study of early American literature, a field I knew little about previously, but has been one of my strongest encouragers in academia and in life. Hilary is not only an inspirational scholar but an exemplary human. Having placed Hilary on the Olympian’s pedestal, I will also say that there are at least a dozen other SEA scholars I could easily name here as part of that pantheon, each with their own unique variation of “quad goodness.” I’m recalling conversations and presentations from the last couple SEA conferences and so many those people and moments shine in my memory. To be overly cheesy but entirely accurate, I’d say that the light generated by this radiant community inspires me in scholarship, moves me in generosity and gives me hope as a person.
Anthony Trujillo is a Ph.D. Candidate in American Studies at Harvard University.