Introduction

Field Notes from a Settler Scholar

Greetings friend, family, and colleagues! I am a settler as a person in that I live in the United States’ state of Virginia on land unlawfully ceded by the Monocan and Tutelo indigenous peoples and work at a university built by enslaved labor. And I’m also a “settler scholar” in that I work on settler colonial literatures and issues.

I am starting this blog as a place to share my works in progress and to record (for myself and others) the texts I’m encountering. I know from prior books, that much of what I read will never make it into the final book. I am (and will) read literally hundreds of novels, plays, poems, diaries, and other texts to generate my study of settler colonialism. And I want to share those texts and my thoughts on them with the world!

I should say that for the next year, I will be completing a book that has been in the works for a long time (more than a decade), which studies stories about mining (mainly gold mining, but also some diamonds and silver) as mechanisms for an important psychological shift in the settler colony from the first wave settler mentality to the second wave. More to come on that!

I will also be writing a writing books–super exciting! And several articles on different topics. I will use this blog to post on all of them. Stay tuned!

If you’re looking for work by my alter writing ego, Anne Hightower, you’re reading the wrong blog. That blog, “Dear Gothic Readers,” which is about mysteries, the gothic, and things that go bump in the night, can be found here: https://annehightower.wordpress.com.

Keep posted for news on my work. And thanks for reading!