The Annual Invitational Lecture of the Society for the Humanities is designed to give a Cornell audience a chance to hear one of our distinguished Cornell humanities faculty members who may frequently speak at other universities, but whom we seldom have the privilege of hearing.

This year's Society Invitational Lecture, “Beyond Settler Feminism: Tillie Paul’s Arrest and Indigenous Feminist Activism," will be delivered by Juliana Hu Pegues (Associate Professor in the Department of Literatures in English, College of Arts & Sciences).

In 1922, Tillie Paul, a Tlingit woman in the small town of Wrangell, Alaska, was jailed and arrested for aiding her uncle and clan leader in his attempt to vote in a local election. Tillie Paul’s advocacy occurred between two historical franchises, after the 19th amendment to the constitution, ratified in 1920, which guaranteed women the right to vote, and before the 1924 Indian Citizenship Act. How does a consideration of Tillie Paul’s choices complicate a tidy teleology of women’s suffrage, one that deploys a misapprehended and cumulative formation of intersectionality for liberal multicultural ends, to consider instead the horizon of messy and incommensurate interstices, of refusals lodged within recognitions? Court documents underscore the limits to settler colonial inclusivity while a children’s book on Tillie Paul’s life alternatively highlights Native feminist understandings of Indigenous responsibilities and relationalities.

Read more about the lecture's topic on the College of Arts & Sciences website. 

Juliana Hu Pegues is Associate Professor of Literatures in English at Cornell, where she is also affiliated with the Asian American Studies and American Studies Programs. She is the author of Space-Time Colonialism: Alaska's Indigenous and Asian Entanglements (University of North Carolina Press, 2021). 

Registration not required. Free and open to the public. Reception to follow the lecture.