Indigenous Experience at World’s Fairs is a conversation featuring Lee D. Baker, Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Sociology, and African and African American Studies at Duke University; Laura Graham, Professor of Anthropology at The University of Iowa; Russell Potter, Professor of English and Media Studies at Rhode Island College and Aaron Glass, curator of The Story Box: Franz Boas, George Hunt and the Making of Anthropology.
Lee D. Baker is Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Sociology, and African and African American Studies at Duke University. He received his B.S. from Portland State University and doctorate in anthropology from Temple University. He has been a resident fellow at Harvard’s W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, and Johns Hopkins’s Institute for Global Studies among many others. His books include From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race 1896-1954 (1998), Life in America: Identity and Everyday Experience (2003), and Anthropology and the Racial Politics of Culture (2010).
Aaron Glass is an Associate Professor at Bard Graduate Center focusing on various aspects of First Nations visual art and material culture, media, and performance on the Northwest Coast of North America, both historically and today. Themes recurring in his work include colonialism and indigenous modernities, cultural brokerage and translation, the politics of intercultural exchange and display, discourses of tradition and heritage management, and cultural and intellectual property. His dissertation, along with a companion film, In Search of the Hamat’sa: A Tale of Headhunting, examines the ethnographic representation and performance history of the Hamat’sa or “Cannibal Dance” of the Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwakiutl) of British Columbia. His Current projects include collaborating with the U’mista Cultural Centre to restore and present Edward Curtis’s 1914 silent film, In the Land of the Head Hunters, and to create a critical, annotated, digital edition of Franz Boas’s pioneering 1897 monograph on the Kwakwaka’wakw culture.
Laura R. Graham is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Iowa. Her research focuses on Indigenous agency and the politics of representation among Indigenous peoples of Lowland South America. She has carried out field research among the A’uwẽ-Xavante of central Brazil since 1981 and among Wayuu peoples of Venezuela and Colombia since 2006. Graham has written extensively on Indigenous speech and forms of self-representation in national and international arenas, including ethnographic spectacle and use of new media technologies. Graham is author of the award-winning book, Performing Dreams: Discourses of Immortality among the Xavante of Central Brazil (1995; Portuguese edition with original field recordings 2018) and co-editor of Performing Indigeneity: Global Histories and Contemporary Experiences (2014) and Language and Social Justice in Practice (2018).
Russell Potter is an American writer and Professor of English and Media Studies at Rhode Island College. His teaching areas are Victorian literature and visual culture, history of arctic exploration, history of Media, Hip-hop culture, linguistics, literary theory. His books include Spectacular Vernaculars: Hip-Hop and the Politics of Postmodernism (1995) and Arctic Spectacles: The Frozen North in Visual Culture, 1818-1875 (2007), as well as a novel, Pyg: The Memoirs of a Learned Pig (2011). He is editor of the Arctic Book Review and has also worked as a consultant on, and appears in, the Nova documentary Arctic Passage.
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