Keynote Speakers

Christine Bold

 Christine Bold will be speaking Friday evening at the Bozeman Public Library.

Christine Bold is a Professor in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph.  She has authored and edited six books--two of them multiple-award winners--as well as numerous articles, chapters, and editorial projects. She has three main areas of interest. Her longest-standing focus is on U.S. popular print culture of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Her most recent book in this field is The Frontier Club: Popular Westerns and Cultural Power, 1880-1924 (Oxford U.P., 2013)--winner of the 2014 Thomas J. Lyon Book Award in Western American Literary and Cultural Studies (sponsored by the Western Literature Association); winner of the 2014 Robert K. Martin Prize for Best Book (sponsored by the Canadian Association for American Studies); and a CHOICE "Outstanding Academic Title" of 2013. Additional publications in this area include: ed., U.S. Popular Print Culture, 1860-1920 (Oxford U.P., 2011, as part of their multi-volume series, The Oxford History of Popular Print Culture); Selling the Wild West: Popular Western Fiction, 1860 to 1960 (Indiana U.P., 1987); and a number of introductions, chapters, and articles. Recently, this interest has developed into a project on popular performance; currently, she holds a SSHRC Insight Development Grant to work on "Vaudeville Indians."

Dr. Bold has also worked on public funding of the arts, specifically in terms of the New Deal innovations in 1930s’ America. Two books resulted from that archival research—Writers, Plumbers, and Anarchists: The WPA Writers’ Project in Massachusetts (U. of Massachusetts P., 2006) and The WPA Guides: Mapping America (U.P. of Mississippi, 1999)—as well as several chapters and articles and contributions to the documentary film Soul of a People: Voices from the Writers’ Project (dir. Andrea Kalin, Spark Media, 2009).  

Her third main research area concerns memorializing violence against women, a field in which she worked collaboratively with academics in other disciplines and frontline workers against violence against women. An academic-community partnership formed the Cultural Memory Group (consisting of Christine Bold, Sly Castaldi, Ric Knowles, Jodie McConnell, and Lisa Schincariol), which went on to publish Remembering Women Murdered by Men: Memorials across Canada (Sumach P., 2006) as well as several chapters and articles. This book won a Bronze IPPY (Independent Publisher Book Award), Women’s Issues Category; it was a finalist for Foreword Magazine's Book of the Year Awards, Women's Issues Category; and it was named “Best Book on Violence against Women” by 2007 Women of Distinction winner (Darlene Lawson, Executive Director of Barbra Schlifer Clinic, Toronto) in NowMagazine.

Patty Limerick

Patty Limerick will be speaking Thursday evening at the Museum of the Rockies.

Patty Limerick is the Faculty Director and Chair of the Board of the Center of the American West at the University of Colorado, where she is also a Professor of History. Limerick has dedicated her career to bridging the gap between academics and the general public and to demonstrating the benefits of applying historical perspective to contemporary dilemmas and conflicts. In January 2016 she became the Colorado State Historian. In addition, in January 2016 she was appointed to the National Endowment for the Humanities advisory board, the National Council on the Humanities. Patty was nominated by President Obama in Spring 2015 and was confirmed by the United States Senate in November 2015.

Limerick received her Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University in 1980, and from 1980 to 1984 she was an Assistant Professor of History at Harvard. In 1984, Limerick moved to Boulder to join the History Department of the University of Colorado. In 1985 she published Desert Passages, followed in 1987 by her best-known work, The Legacy of Conquest, an overview and reinterpretation of Western American history that has stirred up a great deal of both academic and public debate. In 2012 she published A Ditch in Time: The City, the West, and Water, a history of water in Denver. 

Limerick has received a number of awards and honors recognizing the impact of her scholarship and her commitment to teaching, including the MacArthur Fellowship (1995 to 2000) and the Hazel Barnes Prize, the University of Colorado’s highest award for teaching and research (2001). She has advised documentary and film projects, and done two tours as a Pulitzer Nonfiction jurist, as well as chairing the 2011 Pulitzer jury in History. She regularly engages the public on the op-ed pages of local and national newspapers, and in the summer of 2005 she served as a guest columnist for The New York Times. Limerick is also known as an energetic, funny, and engaging public speaker, sought after by a wide range of Western constituencies that include private industry groups, state and federal agencies, and grassroots organizations.

Limerick has served as President of the Organization of American Historians, American Studies Association, the Western History Association, and the Society of American Historians, and as the Vice President of the Teaching Division of the American Historical Association, where she co-wrote a successful proposal to the Lumina Foundation, on “tuning” (as in tuning up an orchestra) the historical profession’s teaching efforts. She is currently the President of the Organization of American Historians. In 1986, Limerick and CU Law Professor Charles Wilkinson founded the Center of the American West, and since 1995 it has been her primary point of affiliation.  Under her leadership, the Center of the American West serves as a forum committed to the civil, respectful, problem-solving exploration of important, often contentious, public issues. In an era of political polarization and contention, the Center strives to bring out “the better angels of our nature” by appealing to our common loyalties and hopes as Westerners.

Rebecca Saletan

Rebecca Saletan will be speaking Friday after lunch in the MSU SUB.

Rebecca Saletan is vice president and editorial director of Riverhead Books. As Ivan Doig's longtime editor, Saletan brought Doig with her when she moved from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt to Riverhead Books. Doig called Saletan "one of the three essential women who prop me up," along with his agent, Liz Darhansoff, and his wife, Carol. 

Founded in 1994, Riverhead Books is now well established as a publisher of bestselling literary fiction and quality nonfiction. Throughout its history, Riverhead has been dedicated to publishing extraordinary groundbreaking, unique writers. Riverhead’s books and authors have won or been finalists for Pulitzer Prizes, National Book Awards, National Book Critic Circle Awards, MacArthur Genius Awards, Hurston Wright Legacy Awards, Dayton Literary Peace Prizes, and numerous other distinctions. 

Before cultivating a prominent publishing career, Saletan received a degree in English at Yale. Over the course of more than three decades in publishing, she has acquired and edited a range of award-winning and best-selling fiction and nonfiction by writers such as Ivan Doig, Peter Matthiessen, Masha Gessen, Mohsin Hamid, Claire Vaye Watkins, Junot Diaz, Hanna Rosin, Diane McWhorter and Philippe Petit. Saletan has worked on such titles as Hillary Rodham Clinton’s “It Takes a Village” and “The Reluctant Fundamentalist” by Mohsin Hamid. Saletan has also worked at Yale University Press; Random House; Simon & Schuster; Farrar, Straus and Giroux (where she was editorial director of North Point Press) and Harcourt (then Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), where she was publisher. 

In discussing publishing, Saletan commented that “for me, I’m less interested in things that reflect the world and the familiar literature that I already know. I want things to take me into new zones. I think that’s a big part of why people read.”