{"id":6621,"date":"2026-03-03T18:25:17","date_gmt":"2026-03-03T18:25:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/english\/?p=6621"},"modified":"2026-03-23T16:36:01","modified_gmt":"2026-03-23T16:36:01","slug":"shelby-johnson-to-deliver-drake-lecture-march-20","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/english\/shelby-johnson-to-deliver-drake-lecture-march-20\/","title":{"rendered":"Shelby Johnson to deliver Drake Lecture \u2013 March 20"},"content":{"rendered":"

Friday, March 20
\n10:00 – 11:00 AM
\n<\/strong>Divinity 127<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cDreaming Sacagawea\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Across the thousands of pages that comprise the eighteen modern volumes of Lewis and Clark\u2019s journals (1803-1806), Sacagawea appears in just a hundred passages. Although she may be the most documented Indigenous woman of the early 19th century, few of these entries referred to her by name. By contrast, in many public parks, museum exhibits, and popular images she emerges with immense but static legibility. She appears as an archetype of what Patricia Vettel-Becker names \u201cAmerica\u2019s maternal feminine,\u201d for she is always portrayed walking thousands of miles while carrying her child\u2014a posture largely invented by white suffragettes in the early 20th century. In its aspiration to do more than merely recount the sedimentations of sexual violence and settler expropriation deposited by the expedition\u2019s records and popular mythology, this presentation forges another itinerary for writing about Sacagawea\u2019s life, one that subsumes colonial regimes of verifiable \u201cfacts\u201d with other ways of knowing. I imagine what it could look like to write over the empirical \u201ctruths\u201d assembled in Lewis and Clark\u2019s journals, as well as her overdetermined mythology in popular images, with the lived experiences of Sacagawea\u2019s community, human and otherwise.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"PhotoShelby Johnson<\/a> is an assistant professor of English at Oklahoma State University, where she researches and teaches on sexuality, race and, environmental studies in the long eighteenth century. She is the author of \u201cThe Rich Earth between Us: The Intimate Grounds of Race and Sexuality in the Atlantic World,\u201d<\/em><\/a> which analyzes the works of Black and Indigenous writers in the Atlantic World and examines how their literary production informs \u201cmodes of being\u201d that confronted violent colonial times. She is co-editor of Unsettling Sexuality: Queer Horizons in the Long Eighteenth Century<\/em><\/a> (Delaware University Press, 2024), and her work has appeared in MELUS<\/em>, English Language Notes<\/em>, and The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation<\/em>. She is at work on Climates of Consent: Population Relocation, Cooperative Movements, and Slow Violence, 1783-1840<\/em>, which investigates imperial configurations of consent and coercion that animated both large-scale population relocations of communities of color and the organization of white cooperative movements. She holds a PhD in English from Vanderbilt.<\/p>\n

The event is part of the Robert & Lillian Drake Lecture Series<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Friday, March 20 10:00 – 11:00 AM Divinity 127 \u201cDreaming Sacagawea\u201d Across the thousands of pages that comprise the eighteen modern volumes of Lewis and Clark\u2019s journals (1803-1806), Sacagawea appears in just a hundred passages. Although she may be the most documented Indigenous woman of the early 19th century, few of these entries referred to…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":122,"featured_media":6646,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[16,8,19,18,14,15],"tags":[5],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/english\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/10\/2026\/03\/Screenshot-2026-03-03-124053.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6621"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/122"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6621"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6621\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6661,"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6621\/revisions\/6661"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6646"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6621"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6621"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/as.vanderbilt.edu\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6621"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}