Kelly Wisecup, Professor of English, has been awarded the St. Louis Mercantile Library Prize for her 2021 book, Assembled for Use: Indigenous Compilation and the Archives of Early Native American Literatures. Wisecup is also Interim Director (2022-23) of the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities and an affiliate of the Center for Native American and Indigenous Research,
The St. Louis Mercantile Library Prize is presented annually by the Bibliographic Society of America (BSA), and is an academic book prize honoring scholarship in the bibliography of American history and literature. The prize criteria include “rigorous bibliographical merit, future impact, and use in classroom or research settings.”
Wisecup is a literary and cultural historian whose work brings together early American studies, Native American and Indigenous Studies, and histories of books and archives. Assembled for Use details early Native American literature by examining Indigenous non-narrative texts like lists, albums, medicinal recipes, and scrapbooks in order to better understand the relationships between Native materials and settler-colonial collections.
In its announcement of the win, the Prize Committee described Wisecup’s book as a “fine example of critical bibliographical practice drawing heavily on traditional bibliographical sources, especially those (like subscription lists and scrapbooks) which have been commonly overlooked, until now.”
Read more about Wisecup’s book.