English Faculty Member’s book on American Indians to be published

Morgantown, WV, January 9, 2006:  Dr. Cari Carpenter’s book, Seeing Red: Anger, Sentimentality, and American Indians, is set to hit shelves next year. Dr. Carpenter is a member of the Native American Studies Committee, and assistant professor of English in West Virginia University’s Eberly College of Arts and Sciences.

Seeing Red: Anger, Sentimentality, and American Indians argues that while early Native American women writers used a variety of tactics to protest dispossession and to articulate indigenous nationhood, sentimentality was a critical and under-acknowledged avenue for such protest. As Dr. Carpenter explains in her book, “Often represented by Anglo-Americans as either savages or stoics-representations in intricately associated with nineteenth-century constructions of anger-indigenous writers had the difficult task of mounting a respectable protest that was not reduced to such stereotypes.”

Carpenter earned her B.A. in English and psychology in 1995 from the University of Colorado, Boulder, and two graduate degrees from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor: an M.A. in English (1998) and a dual Ph.D. in English and women’s studies (2002). She spent the next two years as a Mellon Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at Kalamazoo College. She has authored articles on topics such as feminist pedagogy and early American Indian women writers.

Dr. Bonnie Brown, coordinator of the Native American Studies program, describes Dr. Carpenter as “a tremendous asset to our Native American Studies Faculty Committee.”

“Students consistently tell me how much they have benefited from her courses,” Dr. Brown continues. “Cari has helped coordinate our undergraduate research colloquia and regularly contributes to the NAS program in many ways.”

Seeing Red: Anger, Sentimentality, and American Indians will be published by the Ohio State University Press. For more information, please contact Dr. Cari Carpenter at Cari.Carpenter@mail.wvu.edu.

W-V-U