Submissions for the 2024-2025 Indigenous Learning Forum are open through Monday, June 10. 

Submit your proposal here!

Inspired by the work of the Center for Native American and Indigenous Research (CNAIR), the APS Library & Museum's Indigenous Learning Forum (formerly the Indigenous Studies Seminar Series) is a space for sharing Indigenous-led and community-engaged projects, as well as research in Native American and Indigenous Studies and related fields.

Forum sessions are held roughly once a month between November and May, on Thursdays at 3 pm Eastern. They are held over Zoom. Registration is required and free, and open to attendees of all backgrounds and affiliations. Presenters represent diverse Indigenous communities, professional and scholarly fields, and career levels. 

Questions should be sent to Ruth Rouvier, Native American Scholars Initiative Engagement Coordinator, at [email protected].

2024-2025 Program will be announced in August!

Past Presentations

Spring 2024 Schedule

Thursday, January 18: Rayo Cruz (Bëni Xidza Collective/Universidad de Guadalajara, México), "La enseñanza del Zapoteco como segunda lengua/Teaching Zapotec as a second language"

Thursday, February 15: Jacqueline S. Campo (University of Massachusetts Boston), "Limeños andinos: Narratives of indigenous Quechua migrants from the Andes to Lima, the capital of Peru"

Thursday, March 21: Jennifer Komorowski (Oneida Nation of the Thames/Toronto Metropolitan University) and Nyssa Komorowski (Oneida Nation of the Thames/University of Toronto), "Ukwehuwe Stories: A Philosophy and History of Being in the World"

Thursday, April 18: Keith Richotte, Jr. (Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians/University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill), "The Worst Trickster Story Ever Told: Native America, Plenary Power, and the U.S. Constitution"

Fall 2023 Schedule

Thursday, November 2: Alexandra Lamiña (Kitu-Kara/University of Texas at Austin/APS), "Indigenous Countertopography of Femicide: Witnessing the Modern Gender Genocide"

Thursday, November 30: Hali Dardar (United Houma Nation/Smithsonian), "Archival Material in Media Art – the 2023 Indigenous Gulf Stream"

Spring 2023 Schedule

Thursday, February 9: Mneesha Gellman, Emerson College, "Learning to Survive: Native American and Immigrant-Origin Youth Wellness in Schools." 

Thursday, March 30: Ian McCallum, University of Toronto, "Asiiskusiipuw." 

Thursday, May 25: Joseph Dupris, University of Colorado Boulder, "The American Indian in western linguistic inquiry: Toward tribalized language research."

Fall 2022 Schedule

Friday, October 28: Marlen Rosas, Haverford College, "Contending Visions of Indigenous Education in Ecuador: The Potential of the Radical 1940s."

Friday, December 16: David Dry, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, "Advocating for Allotment: Civil Rights and Sovereign Ends."

Spring 2022 Schedule

Friday, January 21: Blake Grindon, Princeton University, “The Mohawk Atlantic in the Age of Revolution: Cultural Brokerage and the Politics of Alliance, 1775-76"

Friday, February 18: Eli Nelson, Williams University,   "Transing the first Native American Doctor."

Friday, April 22: Alejandra Dubcovsky and George Aaron Broadwell, University of California Riverside and University of Florida,   "Cumenatimococo, With all our Heart: Native Literacy and Power in Colonial Florida."

Friday, May 13: Robert Caldwell, Brown University, "  Albert Gallatin, philology and the emergence of ethnological mapping in the United States: Natural Sciences and Republican Ideals."

Spring 2021 Schedule

Friday, January 22: Patrick Lozar, University of Victoria, "'Home was, part of north of the line, and part of the time south of it': Families, Belonging, and Status in a Persistent Borderland." 

Friday, February 12: Mary McNeil (Harvard University), "The Factory of Genocide: Deer Island’s Carceral Geography"

Friday, March 19: Elizabeth Ellis (New York University), "  Remembering, Forgetting, and Mythologizing the Petites Nations”

Friday, April 16: Thompson Smith, Tribal History and Ethnogeography Projects, Séliš-Ql̓ispé Culture Committee, Confederated Salish & Kootenai Tribes, "Sk͏ʷsk͏ʷstúlex͏ʷ — Names Upon the Land: A Geography of the Salish and upper Kalispel People"

Friday, May 14: Katrina Srigley (Nipissing University) and Glenna Beaucage (Culture and Heritage Department, Nipissing First Nation), "Contributions to Ngodweyaan (Family) and Ezhidaayang (Community) on and beyond Nbisiing Nishnaabeg Territory"

Spring 2020 Schedule

Friday, February 7: Jessica Locklear, Temple University, “A History of Lumbee Migrations to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1945-2004; Chapter 2: A Lumbee Church on Frankford Avenue, 1965-2004”

Friday, March 6: Rosanna Dent, New Jersey Institute of Technology, “Bureaucratic Vulnerability: Possession, Sovereignty, and Relationality in Brazilian Research Regulation”

Friday, April 24: Cindy Ott, University of Delaware, "Ranch Work: Conflict, Compromise & Collaboration Among Historic Rivals," chapter 1 of Biscuits & Buffalo: Reinvention of American Indian Culture in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

Friday, May 15: Peter Olsen-Harbich, The College of William & Mary, “"Quand ung homme a desservi mort” (When a Man Deserves to Die): Encountering Coercion in the Medieval Eastern Woodlands, 1501-1611”

Fall 2020 Schedule

Friday, November 6: Shandin Pete, Salish Kootenai College, “A Review of Salish Astronomical Knowledge".

Friday, December 18: Jermani Ojeda Ludeña, University of Texas at Austin, “Using Media to Promote Quechua Culture and Identity in the Peruvian Andes"

Fall 2019 Schedule

September 18: Morgan Ridgway, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and 2018-2019 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Native American Scholars Initiative (NASI) Predoctoral Fellow, "(Re)Thinking Indian: The Handbook of the North American Indian and the Body in the Decade of the Bicentennial"

October 30: April Anson, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, Penn Program for the Environmental Humanities, "Master Metaphor: Environmental Apocalypse and the Settler State of Emergency"

December 10: Kate Riestenberg, Postdoctoral Fellow in Linguistics, Bryn Mawr College, "Promoting Zapotec language learning through meaningful social interaction"

9:30-10:45am Panel 1: Social Networks

“Science, Skepticism, and Societies: the Politics of Knowledge Creation in the Early Republic”
George Oberle, George Mason University

“Who You Know: How Social and Educational Networks Fostered Professional Identity Among American Doctors, 1780-1815”
Sarah Naramore, The University of the South

“Benjamin Smith Barton's Natural History Network: Local Knowledge and Atlantic Community”
Peter Messer, Mississippi State University

“Planting the Seeds of Empire: Botanical Gardens and Correspondence Networks in Antebellum America”
Alicia DeMaio, Harvard University

Comment: Andrew Shankman, Rutgers University, Camden

11:15-12:15pm Panel 2: Reconstructing Networks

“Spatial Expansion and State Power in the Nineteenth-Century United States”
Cameron Blevins, Northeastern University

“Intertribal Networks in the Colonized American West, 1870-1895”
Justin Gage, University of Arkansas

“Mapping the Networks of African North Americans Hidden in U.S. Government Records: Cases from Pension Files and the Census”
Adam Arenson, Manhattan College

Comment: Maeve Kane, SUNY Albany

2:15-3:15pm Panel 4: Reproducing Networks

“Plagiarism as Dialogue: The Loyalist Historians as Transatlantic Mediators”
Eileen Cheng, Sarah Lawrence College

“Before the Truth Puts its Boots on: Mis-Information Networks in 19th Century America”
Robert MacDougall, University of Western Ontario

“Worlds of Wonder: Tracing Reproductions of Microscopy Illustrations in the Nineteenth Century”
Lea Beiermann, Maastricht University

Comment: Richard John, Columbia University

3:30-4:45pm Panel 5: Networks and Nodes

“From Brussels to Europe: Building a Big Data Set in the Nineteenth Century”
Kevin Donnelly, Alvernia University

“Visualizing 19th and 20th Century Women in Science”
Serenity Sutherland, SUNY Oswego

“The Cybernetic Effect: Soviet Mind Research in the 1960s and 70s”
Ekaterina Babintseva, University of Pennsylvania

“Organizations and Knowledge Networks”
Janet Vertesi, Princeton University

Comment: Robert M. Hauser, Executive Officer, American Philosophical Society

The recipient selected for the 2019 Henry Allen Moe Prize in the Humanities is Alexander Jones, Professor of History of the Exact Sciences in Antiquity and Leon Levy Director of the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University, in recognition of his paper “‘Like Opening a Pyramid and Finding an Atomic Bomb’: Derek de Solla Price and the Antikythera Mechanism” read at the American Philosophical Society’s 2017 November Meeting and published in its Proceedings Volume 162, Number 3, September 2018. The award was presented April 26, 2019 at the Society's Spring 2019 Meeting.
    
Alexander Jones recounts advances in the understanding of an obscure archaeological artifact as a series of discoveries and near-misses that began with a grant to Derek de Solla Price from the American Philosophical Society in 1958. As Jones puts it, his essay is, in a sense, a review of an American Philosophical Society research grant and its outcomes. In part a historical detective story about the most important fine machinery to survive from Antiquity, in part a history of scientific inquiry and the role of new technologies, Jones’s essay renders comprehensible the complexity of piecing together this ancient artifact. 
 
Small pieces of corroded metal were salvaged from a Hellenistic shipwreck off the island of Antikythera in 1900–1901. Identified as parts of a Mechanism, they attracted little attention until Price traveled to Athens. Close examination suggested that the Mechanism was not an Archimedean planetarium, as thought, but a mechanical representation of the ancient Babylonian arithmetical approach to mathematical astronomy.

Price’s popular publication in Scientific American in 1959 diverted him from contributing to the 1965 Transactions dedicated to the Antikythera shipwreck, but his crucial conclusions appeared in the Transactions in 1974. Jones shows how such new techniques as microfocus X-ray computed tomography and reflectance transformation imaging have made it possible to improve Price’s reconstruction. The Mechanism was not a “calendar computer” or an atomic bomb in a pyramid, but a sophisticated instrument that displayed the synodic cycles of the planets. Price lacked adequate radiography, and failed to recognize that the dials consisted of spirals, not concentric circles. But his successors would untangle the meaning of the Mechanism that Price had done so much to explain based on his original APS grant. 

The prize was established in 1982 by a gift from the widow of Henry Allen Moe, to honor the longtime head of the Guggenheim Foundation and president of the American Philosophical Society from 1959 to 1970. It pays particular tribute to his firm commitment to the humanities and those who pursue them.  The prize is awarded annually to the author of a paper in the humanities or jurisprudence read at a meeting of the Society.  

Members of the selection committee were Elizabeth Cropper (chair), Dean, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art; Michael McCormick, Goelet Professor of Medieval History, Harvard University; Brent Shaw, Andrew Fleming West Professor of Classics, Princeton University.

The recipient of the Society’s 2018 Benjamin Franklin Medal for Distinguished Achievement in Science is Mary-Claire King, American Cancer Society Professor in the Department of Medicine and the Department of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington in Seattle.  The medal was presented on April 26, 2019 at the Society's Spring 2019 meeting. Her diverse works have included the demonstration that humans and chimpanzees are 99% genetically identical.  She also is recognized for the use of genomic sequencing to identify victims of human rights abuse in identifying children stolen from their families and illegally adopted under the military dictatorship in Argentina.  She is best known for her pioneering work in identifying a single gene, BRCA1, as a cause of inherited breast and ovarian cancer.  Her meticulous and landmark studies empowered women to be tested for deleterious genes that predispose them to breast and/or ovarian cancer and thus providing options for prophylactic surgeries or earlier and more frequent screening.  

Her exemplary research has been recognized with numerous awards, including the Brinker award from the Komen Foundation in 1999, Lasker Award in 2014, and National Medal of Science in 2015.  She was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2012.  

In 1906 Congress authorized the medal to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Franklin’s birth.  President Roosevelt directed that the 1st one go to the Republic of France.  50 copies were given to the American Philosophical Society for its use.  The Society has chosen to be to be parsimonious in their distribution.  For three decades only one was given and that was to Marie Curie in 1921.  Since 1937 they have been awarded more liberally but still quite selectively, for major contributions in the sciences, humanities or public service.  It was decided to present the medal as part of the celebration of the American Philosophical Society’s 275th anniversary 

The members of the selection committee are APS president Linda Greenhouse (chair), Council members representing Classes 1 and 2 Warren M. Washington, Stephen J. Benkovic, Lawrence H. Einhorn, Philip D. Gingerich, Nina G. Jablonski, and executive officer Robert M. Hauser.

The recipient for the 2017 John Frederick Lewis Award is A. Mark Smith in recognition of his book Optical Magic in the Late Renaissance: Giambattista Della Porta’s 'De Refractione' of 1593. The award was presented April 26, 2019 at the Society Spring 2019 meeting.

Mark Smith presents a “critical English translation” of Giambattista Della Porta’s De Refractione (1593). Offering a general introduction that deals with both the treatise’s historical  context and its technical aspects, Dr. Smith gives readers an account of Della Porta’s life and works, a discussion of the genesis of De Refractione, a close examination of his account of visual illusions and their environmental or pathological causes, and a study of the historical significance of Della Porta’s account of light and sight within the broader context of natural philosophy as it evolved in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Following the Introduction is a “modernized” transcription of the original Latin text and the English translation of the transcription. The transcription provided by Dr. Smith is important because the printed original is incredibly disordered and maladroit. Not only does it abound in textual errors, some of them significant, but the accompanying diagrams are often so poorly executed as to be misleading. 

Mark Smith is Curators’ Distinguished Professor at the University of Missouri. He teaches a variety of courses in medieval history as well as the history of science from antiquity to the late Enlightenment. His interests lie in the field of intellectual history from the pre-Socratics to the Enlightenment, his scholarly focus being on the evolution of pre-Newtonian theories of visual perception. His earlier publications with the American Philosophical Society include Ptolemy’s Theory of Visual Perception: An English Translation of the Optics with Introduction and Commentary (1996), Ptolemy and the Foundations of Ancient Mathematical Optics: A Source Based Study Guide (1999), and a seven-volume collection of books on Alhacen’s Optics (2001-2010). Dr. Smith received the Lewis Award in 2001 for Alhacen’s Theory of Visual Perception (Volume 1) and in 2010 Alhacen on Refraction (Volume 7).

In 1935 the Society established the John Frederick Lewis Award with funds donated by his widow.  The award recognizes the best book or monograph published by the Society in a given year.  Members of the selection committee were Glen W. Bowersock (chair), Professor Emeritus of Ancient History, Institute for Advanced Study; Julia Haig Gaisser, Professor Emeritus of Latin, Eugenia Chase Guild Professor Emeritus in the Humanities, Bryn Mawr College; and Noel M. Swerdlow, Professor Emeritus of Astronomy and Astrophysics and of History, University of Chicago.

The 2018 Magellanic Premium medal was awarded to Sandra Faber “for her contributions to the study of galaxy formation and evolution, which have transformed our understanding of these building blocks of the Universe and set the agenda for years to come.  From the discovery of the Faber-Jackson relation to her fundamental contributions to the cold dark matter theory of galaxy formation, she has made galaxy formation and evolution a quantitative science.”  The medal was presented on April 26, 2019, at the Society's Spring 2019 meeting.  The inscription engraved on the medal is “Sandra Faber, for transforming the understanding of galaxy formation and evolution.”

Sandra Faber has been one of the leading optical astronomers since the 1970s whose contributions changed the study of galaxies from a qualitative to a quantitative science. Her observations and analysis showed the quantitative relations among mass, size, velocity dispersion, stellar populations and resident black holes in the massive elliptical galaxies that are the bedrock of extragalactic astronomy.  Among the earliest observers to recognize the prevalence and importance of dark matter, she also was among the earliest to note how feedback from supernova winds would alter the evolution of galaxies. Her numerous prescient contributions form the basis on which modern understanding of galaxy evolution now stands.  

Faber is professor emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and astronomer emerita at University of California Observatories.  She has been recognized by many prizes including the National Medal of Science in 2013.  She was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society in 2001.

The award was established from a gift of 200 guineas by John Hyacinth de Magellan, of London, in 1786, “for a gold medal to be awarded from time to time under prescribed terms, to the author of the best discovery or most useful invention relating to navigation, astronomy, or natural philosophy (mere natural history only excepted).”  The medal, named the Magellanic Premium, was first awarded in 1790.   It is the oldest medal recognizing scientific achievements given by a North American institution.

The selection committee members were Gordon Baym (chair), Professor Emeritus, Research Professor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Marvin Cohen, University Professor of Physics, University of California, Berkeley, Senior Faculty Scientist, Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory; Jeremiah Ostriker, Professor of Astronomy, Columbia University, Professor Emeritus of Astrophysical Sciences, Princeton University; and Michael Turner, Director, Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics, Bruce V. and Diana M. Rauner Distinguished Service Professor, University of Chicago.
 

Contact: Jessica Frankenfield
Phone: 215-701-4427 
Email: [email protected] 

Mapping a Nation: Shaping the Early American Republic Opens at the American Philosophical Society Museum on April 12

“Indeed, what is the history of a country without maps?”
–Sebastian Bauman (1782)

Philadelphia [April 10, 2019]—Why would a government publish a map claiming land they do not control? Why would the citizens of a young nation—still recovering from a war for independence—care about making maps? Opening April 12, 2019, the new exhibition from the American Philosophical Society Museum, Mapping a Nation: Shaping the Early American Republic, traces the creation and uses of maps from the mid-18th century through 1816 to investigate maps’ political and social meanings. 

The exhibition draws on the APS Museum and Library’s extensive holdings and will feature significant Early American maps, the tools that were used to create them, and historical artifacts that represent the figures who negotiated the landscape of the early United States. 

“Early American maps were practical tools that defined physical and political borders,” said APS Museum Director Merrill Mason, “but many of the maps we have on display were also works of art and feats of printing technology.”  

The exhibition traces the history of mapmaking in early America through three phases titled “Empires in Motion,” “Civic Geography,” and “From Sea to Sea.”

Empires in Motion
During the colonial era, European powers competed for North American territory, often making maps that overstated their claims. They also consulted Native American informants and sent out surveyors, mapmakers, and naturalists to learn as much as they could about the continent’s people, geography, plants, and animals. Highlights from this section include:

• John Mitchell’s 1757 Map of the British and French dominions in North America—created for the English government, it claimed lands that were actually in French or Native American hands. After the American colonists declared independence, British officials used the map to negotiate new boundaries.
• Surveying tools that David Rittenhouse used to extend the Mason-Dixon line
• Maps and catalogues from William Bartram’s travels to document American plants and animals

Civic Geography
After the American Revolution, mapmakers shaped national identity by defining the borders of the newly united states. Maps on display from this era include:

• A previously un-exhibited collection of hand-drawn maps used to create the first atlas of the United States
• George Washington’s 1792 copy of the plan for the city of Washington, D.C.

From Sea to Sea
As the United States entered the 19th century, westward expansion became one of the federal government’s priorities. Maps from this period show the nation’s growing infrastructure and expeditions across the continent. Postal routes and road systems soon stretched into the frontier, encouraging settlement by white Americans, many of whom envisioned the expansion of slavery, and obscuring the presence of Native Americans. Visitors will be able to see: 

• The only known document signed by the first four presidents of the United States—the 1793 subscription list for the botanist André Michaux’s proposed western expedition
• Journals and maps from the Lewis and Clark expedition
• 1796 and 1804 maps of American postal routes

The exhibition will be open Thursday–Sunday through December 29, 2019 in Philosophical Hall, 104 South Fifth Street, Philadelphia. Admission is free, but donations are encouraged. Groups can schedule tours by contacting [email protected].

About the APS Museum
Founded in 2001, the APS Museum is located adjacent to Independence Hall in Philadelphia’s historic district. It develops thematic exhibitions from the Society’s collections of over 13 million manuscripts, rare books, artworks, scientific instruments, Native American materials, and other historical objects. Programs expand upon the themes and objects in the exhibitions and relate them to relevant issues today.  
 

Catherine Dulac is the recipient of the 2018 Karl Spencer Lashley Award in recognition of her incisive studies of the molecular and circuit basis of instinctive behaviors mediated through olfactory systems in the mammalian brain. The Prize was awarded to her at the 2018 November meeting of the American Philosophical Society.

Catherine Dulac has elucidated the mechanisms by which the mammalian brain detects pheromones, and processes pheromone-related information to produce social behaviors. Pheromones are molecules that constitute an important mode of communication between members of the same species. Dulac devised single cell cDNA cloning methods for characterizing novel families of pheromone receptors in the vomerulonasal organ (VNO). These discoveries led directly to her groundbreaking work on the anatomical pathways and physiological mechanisms that mediate pheromone effects in the central brain. Dulac showed how VNO circuitry generates sex-specific behaviors in response to pheromones, even though circuits for both male- and female-specific behaviors exist in both sexes. Dulac’s body of work is a brilliant example of how molecular, physiological and behavioral techniques, deployed in concert, can lead to a deep, mechanistically powerful understanding of behavior.

Dr. Dulac is Higgins Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology and Lee and Ezpeleta Professor of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University and an Investigator for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She earned her Ph.D. in developmental biology from the University of Paris.

The Karl Spencer Lashley Award was established in 1957 by a gift from Dr. Lashley, a member of the Society and a distinguished neuroscientist and neuropsychologist. His entire scientific life was spent in the study of behavior and its neural basis. Dr. Lashley’s famous experiments on the brain mechanisms of learning, memory and intelligence helped inaugurate the modern era of integrative neuroscience, and the Lashley Award recognizes innovative work that continues exploration in the field.

The members of the selection committee are William T. Newsome III (Chair), Harman Family Provostial Professor, Vincent V. C. Woo Director of the Stanford Neurosciences Institute, Professor of Neurobiology and, by courtesy, of Psychology, Stanford University; John E. Dowling, Gordon and Llura Gund Research Professor of Neurosciences Emeritus, Harvard University; Ann M. Graybiel, Institute Professor, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Investigator, McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; John G. Hildebrand, Regents Professor of Neuroscience, University of Arizona; Eric Knudsen, Sewell Professor of Neurobiology Emeritus, Stanford University School of Medicine; Edvard Moser, Professor of Neuroscience, Director, Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience, Norwegian University of Science and Technology; and Larry R. Squire, Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry, Neurosciences, and Psychology, University of California, San Diego, Research Career Scientist, Veterans Affairs Medical Center, San Diego.