Parins, James
James Parins, PhD
Director, Student Literacy Corps
Director, American Native Press Archives
Rank: Professor
Office: Suite 500, University Plaza
Office Phone: 569-8336
Email: jwparins@ualr.edu
Educational Background
PhD, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Areas of Focus
Nineteenth-Century British Literature; American Indian Studies
Vita
James W. Parins is a founder and associate director of the Sequoyah National Research Center, one of the world’s largest repositories of Native expression. With Daniel F. Littlefield he published the first comprehensive bibliography of Indians writing before 1924 as well as a three-volume guide to American Indian newspapers and periodicals. These publications did much to open up the study of early Native writing and publishing. He has published three full-length biographies, of William Barnes, the Victorian poet; of John Rollin Ridge, the first Indian novelist; and of Elias Cornelius Boudinot, the Cherokee editor, orator, writer, and politician. Parins has also been active in editing the works of Native writers, publishing volumes of works by B. N. O. Walker, Wyandot fiction writer and poet, and Francis LaFlesche, Omaha fiction writer, as well as an anthology of writers from the southeastern tribes. He is the chief editor of the Tribal Writers Digital Library, which publishes the collected works of Indian writers who published in serials in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The digital library supports the work of student editors here at UALR.