Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar Sarah Rivett: Raven’s Flight through American Literature

Please join us for the 2026  Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar lecture "Raven's Flight through American Literature” with Dr. Sarah Rivett, Professor of English and American Studies at Princeton University.

American literacy history looks different when read from Raven's land- the archives and ecologies of the Pacific Northwest. Moving from the Book of Genesis to Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” from Washington Irving’s ghost stories to Leslie Marmon Silko’s storyteller, the lecture interweaves Tlingit and Haida raven stories to uncover obscured connections between Euro‑Christian and Indigenous traditions.

Sarah Rivett is Professor of English and American Studies at Princeton University. She is the author of The Science of the Soul in Colonial New England (2011), Unscripted America: Indigenous Languages and the Origins of a Literary Nation (2017), and is currently completing Raven’s Land: Indigenous Literature and the American Canon. Her research explores how religion, archives, and ecologies shape American literature across time and place from sixteenth-century New England to twenty-first-century Alaska. Tracing intersections of European, African American, and Indigenous histories, Rivett’s scholarship and teaching seek to recover voices and stories of the past that have been obscured or forgotten in colonial archives. Drawing on a vast archive of oral and written literature, visual images, objects, and religious and scientific texts, Rivett’s research seeks to illuminate the significance of Indigenous traditions as they intersect with and shape American literary and cultural production.