Kelly Wisecup

Kelly Wisecup (she/her) is an author, a literary and cultural historian, and a professor of English at Northwestern University. Her work focuses on Early American studies, Native American and Indigenous studies, and archival histories and theories. Wisecup’s books include Assembled for Use: Indigenous Compilation and the Archives of Early Native American Literatures (Yale, 2021) and Medical Encounters: Knowledge and Identity in Early American Literatures (University of Massachusetts Press, 2013). She is the editor of a scholarly edition of Plymouth colonist Edward Winslow’s Good News from New England (University of Massachusetts Press, 2014). With Lisa Brooks, Wisecup coedited Plymouth Colony: Narratives of English Settlement and Native Resistance from the Mayflower to King Philip’s War, a volume of primary text accounts of the Plymouth Colony on Wampanoag homelands (Library of America, 2022). 

Wisecup's research spans multiple books and digital projects and delves into the multifaceted ways in which Indigenous peoples, whether celebrated authors or unsung voices, engaged with and shaped the world of literature and text. Fellowships from the Newberry Library, the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Antiquarian Society, and the American Philosophical Society supported her scholarship.

Wisecup is an elected lifetime member of the American Antiquarian Society; a member of the board of American Literature (2020–2023); and an associate editor for The Broadview Anthology of American Literature, vol. A (2022). She served as codirector of Northwestern’s Center for Native American and Indigenous Research from 2018–2020 and will continue to contribute her expertise as a member of the Society of Early Americanists executive committee until 2026.