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Don Worster, Hall Distinguished Professor of American History, Laura Mielke, Assistant Professor of English
Byron Caldwell Smith Book Award Lecture

Date:	Thu., Sep. 24, 2009, 7:30-9:00 p.m.
Category:	Special Events
Location:	Hall Center Conference Hall

Don Worster: "John Muir and the Religion of Nature"

Laura Mielke: "Beyond Doomed Indians and Crocodile Tears: Reading Literature from theAge of Removal"

Laura Mielke, Assistant Professor of English, and Don Worster, Hall Distinguished Professor of American History, are the winners of the 2009 Byron Caldwell Smith Book Award, presented by the Hall Center for the Humanities. Mielke won the award for her book, Moving Encounters: Sympathy and the Indian Question in Antebellum Literature, published by University of Massachusetts Press in 2008; Don Worster won the award for his book A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir, published by Oxford University Press in 2008.

The Byron Caldwell Smith Award was established at the bequest of Kate Stephens, a former KU student and one of KU's first women professors. As an undergraduate, Stephens studied Greek language and literature with Professor Byron Caldwell Smith. In his name, she established this award, given biennially to an individual who lives or is employed in Kansas and who has written an outstanding book published in the previous two years.

The award committee's citations are as follows:

"Laura Mielke has written a superb literary history of Native American-White relations produced in text and spectacle during the American antebellum period. Examining works authored by White- and Native-Americans alike, she reveals how well these players understood the seemingly insurmountable problem of co-existence and/or acculturation of the Indian to White society. Neither nave nor judgmental, Mielke's analysis uncovers the history, politics, and opinions behind countless 'sympathetic' representations of the American Indian's plight, most of which reflected sincere endeavors to resolve the 'Indian Question.'"

"Donald Worster's Life of John Muir is one more example of Worster's growing reputation as one of our great living writers of biography. Among the many merits of Worster's book, one stands outthe author's effortless placement of Muir's ideas within the history of the idea of Nature in the West. Worster's book is the product of wide reading well served by his eloquence, wit, and human insight. Worster is a prose master and his book will doubtlessly be enjoyed by a wide readership--for both its content and style. Muir is the work of a literary artist who is also an accomplished historian."