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

Please join us for the 2026 University at Albany 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.

This talk follows a late nineteenth‑century corridor between Alaska and the northeastern United States, tracing the belongings of Tlingit, Tsimshian and Haida people removed by missionaries and geologists and now held in East Coast museums. 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. Raven’s non‑linear “to and fro” flight becomes a template for rethinking literary origins as entangled Black and Indigenous archives of creation, catastrophe and survival rather than a single point of national beginning.

This lecture is hosted by the University at Albany Phi Beta Kappa Alpha Alpha Chapter of New York and the Department of English and sponsored by the Phi Beta Kappa Society’s Visiting Scholar Program.