This Land is Herland: Gendered Activism in Oklahoma

 University of Oklahoma, Norman

October 22-24 (in-person)

November 6-7, 2021 (in-person)

Scholars:

Sarah Eppler Janda, PhD, Cameron University

Patti Loughlin, PhD, University of Central Oklahoma

 This seminar considers the ways in which gender and activism have converged in Oklahoma. This Land is Herland (University of Oklahoma Press, 2021) is a new contributed volume coedited by Sarah Eppler Janda and Patti Loughlin featuring thirteen activists in Oklahoma from the 1870s to the 2010s. From Kate Barnard to Rachel Caroline Eaton to Clara Luper to LaDonna Harris, we will discuss the ways in which their work and legacy connect to larger themes in western women’s history including intersectionality, suffrage, political campaigns, civil rights, and tribal sovereignty. This course will also explore the ‘story’ of women’s lives and activism by examining how women’s experiences are articulated—whether they are celebrated, silenced, reimagined, or critically evaluated. We will look at who tells the stories, what information and sources are used, and what the ‘making’ of women activists reveals about both the past and present.

• Enrollment through your home campus
• OSLEP provides all required reading materials at no additional cost - NO books to buy!

Sarah Eppler Janda is Professor of History at Cameron University in Lawton, Oklahoma. She is the author of Beloved Women: The Political Lives of LaDonna Harris and Wilma Mankiller (Northern Illinois University Press, 2007), Pride of the Wichitas: A History of Cameron University (Oklahoma Heritage Association, 2010), and Prairie Power: Student Activism, Counterculture, and Backlash in Oklahoma, 1962–1972 (University of Oklahoma Press, 2018). She is an active member of the Coalition for Western Women’s History, the Western History Association, and the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians.

Patti Loughlin is Professor of History at the University of Central Oklahoma. Her publications include Hidden Treasures of the American West: Muriel H. Wright, Angie Debo and Alice Marriott (University of New Mexico Press, 2005), Building Traditions, Educating Generations: A History of the University of Central Oklahoma (Oklahoma Heritage Association, 2007) with Bob Burke, and Main Street Oklahoma: An American Story (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013) coedited by Linda Reese. Her book Angie Debo, Daughter of the Prairie (Oklahoma City: Oklahoma Hall of Fame, 2017), received the 2018 Oklahoma Book Award for children/young adult. Patti serves on the Oklahoma Historical Society board of directors, and remains active in the Coalition for Western Women’s History and the Western History Association.

Janda and Loughlin coedited This Land is Herland: Gendered Activism in Oklahoma from the 1870s to the 2010s (University of Oklahoma Press, 2021). Currently they are writing an Oklahoma history textbook for statewide adoption in high schools for the University of Oklahoma Press.

Crude Territory: Rethinking the Identity of Oklahoma.

University of Oklahoma, Norman

January 3-7, 2022 (in-person)

Scholar:  Russell Cobb

Where is Oklahoma? The state has a distinctly Southern political identity with settlement patterns more befitting a Midwestern state. The visible presence of Native American culture leads many to lump Oklahoma in with the Southwest. Oklahoma, in the context of popular culture, is often dismissed as yet another "flyover state," or as a wild and wooly place of frontier violence and oil fortunes won and lost. This seminar leads students in acts of cultural and historical recovery of narratives repressed by mainstream political and media institutions. 

• Enrollment through your home campus
• OSLEP provides all required reading materials at no additional cost - NO books to buy!

Dr. Russell Cobb is Associate Professor in Modern Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta. He is the author of The Great Oklahoma Swindle: Race, Religion, and Lies in America's Weirdest State (Bison Books), winner of the Oklahoma Department of Libraries' Director's Choice Award for 2021. He edited the collection The Paradox of Authenticity in a Globalized World (Macmillan). He has published many scholarly articles on Cold War politics in Latin American literature. He is also the host of the podcast History X, which explores misrepresented or repressed true stories.

How We Bear Witness:  Writing Oklahoma in Fiction and Creative Nonfiction

University of Oklahoma, Norman 

January 10-14 (in-person)

Scholar:  Rilla Askew, University of Oklahoma

This course will be an Intensive writing workshop focused on creating fiction and creative nonfiction that reflects the students’ engagement with Oklahoma as subject and source. Students will read and discuss works by Oklahoma writers such as Joy Harjo, Brandon Hobson, and Constance Squires, and will develop new works of their own to be shared in a supportive writing workshop format.  Coursework will include instruction in the craft of fiction and creative nonfiction as well as exploration of Oklahoma-based fiction and nonfiction.

Rilla Askew is the author of four novels, a book of stories, and a collection of creative nonfiction, as well as plays, articles, and essays. Her first novel, The Mercy Seat was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Dublin IMPAC Prize, and received the Oklahoma Book Award and the Western Heritage Award in 1998. Her novel about the Tulsa Race Massacre, Fire in Beulah, received the American Book Award, the Myers Book Award from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights, and was selected as the centennial book for Oklahoma’s One Book One State program. Her novel Harpsong, published by the University of Oklahoma Press, received seven literary awards including the Oklahoma Book Award, the WILLA Award from Women Writing the West, the Violet Crown Award from the Writers League of Texas, and the Western Heritage Award from the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum. Her novel Kind of Kin, the story of a fractured family and small-town community at the vortex of Oklahoma’s immigration laws, was a finalist for the Spur Award from Western Writers of America, longlisted for the Dublin IMPAC Prize, and selected for Amarillo Reads in 2017. Askew’s collection of essays on race and place, Most American: Notes from a Wounded Place, was longlisted for the PEN/America Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay in 2018.  She teaches creative writing at the University of Oklahoma.