As a part of the year-long Centennial celebration, the Buffalo Bill Center of the West’s Buffalo Bill Museum brought renowned international scholars and museum professionals to Cody, Wyoming, for the highly anticipated Centennial Symposium August 2–5, 2017. Robust session topics consider William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody’s life and enterprises in the context of American Western Studies.
Read further to learn about our featured Keynote speakers and the topics they shared at the Centennial Symposium in the Center’s Coe Auditorium.
Patty Limerick – The Persistent Power of Paradox: Buffalo Bill Cody’s Life as A Field Guide to the History of the American West
Patty Limerick is Faculty Director and Chair of the Board of the Center of the American West, University of Colorado. Indebted to the vigorous work of scholars like Joy Kasson (Buffalo Bill’s Wild West: Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History) and Louis Warren (Buffalo Bill’s America: William Cody and the Wild West Show), Limerick applies the idea of paradox to Cody’s relationships with Native Americans, his encounters with the federal government, his skillful refining and repurposing of the raw materials of nostalgia, and his construction, demolition, and reconstruction of Western masculinity. Limerick’s presentation takes place August 2, 12:30 – 2 p.m.
Arthur Amiotte – Cross-Cultural Family Experiences
As an educator and founder of the Plains Indian Advisory Board, Arthur Amiotte has taught all aspects of Native traditional and contemporary studio fine arts. As an award-winning scholar, he has numerous publications on Native art/culture and has lectured throughout the United States and Europe. He defines his work as being bound to the reservation culture. In 2002, the Buffalo Bill Center of the West hosted a special exhibition titled The Arthur Amiotte Retrospective: Continuity and Diversity, then the most comprehensive exhibition to date of the work of the internationally noted Lakota artist. His presentation takes place August 3, 12:30 – 2 p.m.
Louis Warren – Buffalo Bill in the Borderlands: Taking the Wild West to the World
Award-winning author, Louis Warren, is an American historian and a W. Turrentine Jackson Professor of Western U.S. History at the University of California, Davis, where he teaches environmental history, the history of the American West, and U.S. history. In addition to teaching at UC Davis, Warren has written and edited several books on U.S. Western and Environmental History. His presentation takes place August 3 at 6:30 p.m.
Christine Bold – Buffalo Bill and “Dime Novelitis”
Christine Bold is Professor of English at the University of Guelph. She has published six books and numerous essays on popular culture and cultural memory, including the award-winning The Frontier Club: Popular Westerns and Cultural Power, 1880-1924. The focus of Bold’s presentation, “Dime Novelitis,” a term coined in 1907, stood for boy readers’ perceived addiction to cheap westerns. Buffalo Bill dime novels played a distinctive role in this moral panic, connecting it to larger cultural struggles which this talk traces through print, performance, and film. While these dime novels shaped how the world looked at the Wild West, they were also reshaped by Native peoples looking back. Bold’s presentation takes place August 4, 12:30 – 2 p.m.
Paul Hutton – Buffalo Bill and the Creation of the Frontier Myth
Paul Hutton is an American cultural historian, award-winning author, documentary writer, and television personality. He serves as Distinguished Professor of History at the University of New Mexico, has published widely in both scholarly and popular magazines, and is an award-winning author. He has written several short films for state and national parks, as well as a dozen television documentaries, and has appeared in more than 300 television programs. He has also been active as a public historian, guest curating major exhibits in several renowned institutions. His latest book, The Apache Wars, was published by Crown in May 2016. Hutton’s presentation takes place August 4 at 6:30 p.m.
