Matt Cohen is professor of English as well as affiliate faculty in Native American studies at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, where he also codirects the Walt Whitman Archive. He has written or edited six books, including the award-winning The Networked Wilderness: Communicating in Early New England (Minnesota, 2009).
I remember the bold, proud, and highfalutin terms we used to toss about in early American studies, so proud of our own 'discoveries' and 'understandings.' Because that's the model we inherited. Because we did not know any better. But now we do-thanks to Matt Cohen's rigorous and powerful remodulation of our scholarly language. This book points us in the direction of better scholarship, by which I mean greater care, awe, patience, and accountability. A model work of literary criticism for our chastened and tender times. -Joanna Brooks, author of Why We Left: Untold Stories and Songs of America's First Immigrants The Silence of the Miskito Prince is almost alchemical in its ability to draw new insights from familiar texts. Matt Cohen's work will be a model for literary scholars, and maybe even some historians, of the power of scholarship that considers the work that words can and cannot do. -Jonathan Beecher Field, Clemson University