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Dr. Joy Porter
Specialist Subjects: Native American Indian History & Literature; Indigenous Studies; Modernity; U.S. Freemasonry & Associationalism; issues surrounding ethnicity and the Environment; Ethnicity & the World Wars; aspects of Canadian Studies.
Biography
JOY PORTER is Senior Lecturer and Associate Dean for the College of Arts & Humanities. She gained her M.A. and PhD from the University of Nottingham in 1990 and 1993 respectively and before coming to Swansea in 2004 was a Senior Lecturer in American History at Anglia Ruskin Cambridge. She has over 20 publications including 6 books, has organized two externally funded major international conferences and has held Visiting Professorships at the University of Paris, Diderot and at The Clinton Institute, Dublin. She has also delivered invited lectures across Europe and North America. The research underpinning her monograph Native American Freemasonry: Associationalism and Performance in America (University of Nebraska Press, 2011) was funded by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship. Other aspects of her work have benefited from a number of awards (AHRC, British Academy, British Association of Canadian Studies, Association of Canadian Studies in the U.S., Canadian Government Research Award). She is currently a member of the AHRC Peer Review College (History, Thought & Culture).
Current Research
Joy Porter is currently PI on a research project funded by an AHRC Research Fellowship entitled “The American Indian Poet of the First World War: Modernism and the Indian Identity of Frank ‘Toronto’ Prewett 1893-1962”. The project allows the creation of the first book to make serious, conceptual arguments about Native American identity on both sides of the Atlantic during and after the First World War. The American Indian Poet of the First World War: Modernism and the Indian Identity of Frank “Toronto” Prewett, 1893-1962 draws upon material from untouched archives in Texas, Toronto and the UK to explain why this "Indian soldier" was so attractive to British intellectuals of the time -from Prewett’s publisher Virginia Woolf to Robert Graves, Thomas Hardy, Wilfred Owen and T.E. Lawrence. The research has been showcased across a series of US museums. The project intends to bring a new dimension to the study of the first world war and to reveal how primitivism was part of the modernist agenda on both sides of the Atlantic.
Joy Porter will be a British Academy Mid-Career Fellow from October 2011 to October 2012. She is PI on the research project "The American Presidency and Tribal Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century" (Award value: £113,950.00). The project addresses the most important question in twentieth-century Native American politics- how decisive were personal tribal relationships with individual American presidents? The answer could alter fundamentally not only our existing understandings of the presidency but also how we conceptualise relationships between "small nations" and dominant powers more generally. It is work of profound interest to Native peoples and to anyone curious about how individual presidents functioned. Joy Porter will carry out research in presidential libraries and archives in Maryland and New Mexico during 2012.
Frank James Prewett 1893-1962
http://news.nationalpost.com/2011/08/04/taking-poetic-licence-with-native-ancestry/
Joy Porter-The American Presidency and Tribal Diplomacy in the Twentieth Century
Selected Recent Publications
Joy Porter’s book on freemasonry among American Indians deepens our understanding of how an institution once seen solely as elitist and secret could be used to give meaning of native American spiritual beliefs and social activism. It joins a growing scholarly literature that is changing the way we view freemasonry as well as our understanding of Indian Americans. "A triumph of scholarship!” Margaret C. Jacob, Distinguished Professor of History. UCLA
Native American Freemasonry - review
Land and Spirit in Native America
"Land-culture-community is the foundation we live upon and within, the grandmothers and grandfathers say—even when it is a complex matter. I’m glad Joy Porter has written extensively and masterfully about this matter of continuity in her book". -Acoma poet Simon J. Ortiz, author of Woven Stone, from Sand Creek, Out There Somewhere.
- (forthcoming June, 2012) Land and Spirit in Native America, Praeger Press.
- (2011), Native American Freemasonry: U.S. Associationalism and Performance in America, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press (link).
- (2010), "Modernism, Authenticity and Indian Identity: Frank 'Toronto' Prewett (1893-1962)" in Deborah L. Madsen, ed. Native Authenticity: Transatlantic Approaches to Native American Literature, Albany: State University of New York Press. ISBN-10: 1438431686; ISBN-13: 978-1438431680 (link).
- (2009)Competing Voices from Native America (Fighting Words Series), Joy Porter [50%] & Dewi Ball, Oxford & Santa Barbara, California: Greenwood Press, ISBN (Hb): 978-1-84645-016-7 (link)
- (2009) 'Native American Fiction' in David Seeds (ed.) Companion to 20th Century US Fiction, Oxford: Blackwell, ISBN-10: 1405146915; ISBN-13:978-1405146913 (link).
- (2008) “Primitive” Discourse: Aspects of Contemporary North American Indian Representations of the Irish and of Contemporary Irish Representations of North American Indians “, American Studies [A tri-annual interdisciplinary journal sponsored by the Mid-America American Studies Association and the University of Kansas]. Fall/Winter 2008 American Studies (49:3/4) (link).
- (2008) “Indiens et franc-maçonnerie: une vision performative de l’historire américaine” /“Native American Indian Freemasonry and the Performative Turn within U.S. History”, Race & the Body in Anglophone Context/ Race et corps dans L’aire Anglophone, Michel Prum, ed. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2008. ISBN: 978-2-296-06606-9; EAN: 9782296066069. p.113-135.
- (2007) “Population Matters in Native America” in America’s Americans: Population Issues in U.S. Society and Politics, edited by Philip Davies & Iwan Morgan, London: Institute for the Study of the Americas, University of London, School of Advanced Study, Dec. 2007, ISBN: 978 1 900039 79 6.
Selected Research Awards, fellowships, & prizes
- 2011 British Academy Mid-Career Fellow, £113,915.
- 2010 AHRC Research Fellowship, £51,417.00
- 2008 British Academy Overseas Conference Attendance Grant (£200)
- 2008 The Cambridge Companion to Native American Literature, Eds. Joy Porter & Kenneth Roemer (University of Texas), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, won the “Writer of the Year” award from the Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers.
PhD Supervision
Joy Porter is currently supervising an overseas PhD student working on aspects of Native American Indian Film. She welcomes enquiries on all aspects of Native American Indian Studies; on U.S. Freemasonry & Associationalism and on U.S. Environmentalism.
BA (Nottingham Trent), MA, PhD (Nottingham)
Department of Political and Cultural Studies, College of Arts & Humanities
Swansea
TEL: +44 (0) 1792 294293
FAX: +44 (0) 1792 295716
E-MAIL: j.porter@swansea.ac.uk
