Jennifer E Shook

Book Project:

My project centers Native American dramatists’ and poets’ representations of early American historical crises. I follow traveling ghosts, bones, reenactments, and memorials in and out of the mixed-blood migrant space of Indian Territory, connecting politics and policy with the print public sphere and performance studies. While I focus on contemporary performances, understanding their nexus of meanings requires reconfiguring the ongoing presence of the past in archives and even in digital commemorations. Even social media activism protesting racist mascots, missing and murdered indigenous women, and the theft of Native remains from unknown bones to Jim Thorpe’s body, continues playing out dialogues scripted in previous centuries.

As a former social media correspondent for The Digital Studio for Public Arts and Humanities at the University of Iowa and now as Digital Bridges Fellow at Grinnell College, I have reported on a number of events, including, for the Obermann Center, on Iowa's first Humanities Festival.