James Fenimore Cooper is recognized as the father of American literature, the first American author of international standing, and creator of several important literary genres, including the frontier romance and the sea novel. Cooper, of course, did not write in a vacuum; he was a central figure in a much larger literary and intellectual world, engaging in dialogue over the most significant political, cultural, and aesthetic issues of his time.  For the 2011 conference we will focus on Cooper and his relationships with those figures who inhabited his intellectual and cultural landscape. 

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Shirley Samuels, Professor of English and American Studies at Cornell University.  She is the author of Facing America: Iconography and the Civil War, and Romances of the Republic: Women, the Family, and Violence in the Literature of the Early American Nation.