Rebecca Pelky has been appointed assistant professor of film studies at Clarkson University.
She received her Ph.D. in English from University of Missouri, her master of fine arts degree in creative writing from Northern Michigan University, her bachelor of arts in English from Indiana University, and her bachelor of science in zoology from Northern Michigan University.
Pelky’s interdisciplinary research focuses on representations of Indigenous peoples in Native and non-Native film and literature, with a concentration on issues of self-representation and sovereignty. Her most recent work on poem-films, a short film genre, situates this emerging hybrid form as fruitful space for engaging with questions of identity, community, and continuance.
A poet, she authored the book Horizon of the Dog Woman. She is currently finishing her second manuscript, Through a Red Place, a bilingual collection of poems which responds to archival, historical, and field research to consider how Native and non-Native people have historically utilized the same land. She is also co-authoring a book of poetry translations by Chilean poet Matilde Ladrón de Guevara.
Pelky has published poetry with The Academy of American Poets, December, River Styx, and Cream City Review, among many other publications, and has presented papers at a number of conferences. She is co-author of Hiking Michigan’s Upper Peninsula 3rd Ed. and was an associate poetry editor of Passages North.
She has been a recipient of the Gus T. Ridgel Fellowship, a King-Chavez-Parks Fellowship, as well as being a winner of the Academy of American Poets Prize, among other awards and honors.
Pelky is a member of the Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures, the Native American & Indigenous Studies Association, the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, and the College English Association.
She was previously an instructor of record at University of Missouri and Northern Michigan University, a wildlife dietician at Potawatomi Zoo in South Bend, Ind., and a zookeeper at Binder Park Zoo in Battle Creek, Mich.
Pelky is an enrolled member of the Brothertown Indian Nation of Wisconsin.
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