Gordon Sayre is Professor of English at the University of Oregon.  He is a specialist in colonial and Early American Literature from the sixteenth through early nineteenth centuries, with a particular interest in French colonial history and literature, the exploration and cartography of North America in Native American literature and ethnohistory, and natural history and eco-criticism.  Among other works, he is the author of The Indian Chief as Tragic Hero: Native Resistance and the Literatures of America, from Moctezuma to Tecumseh (2005) and “Les Sauvages Américains:” Representations of Native Americans in French and English Colonial Literature (1997), and editor of The Memoir of Lieutenant Dumont: A Sojourner in the French Atlantic, 1715-1747 (U of North Carolina Press, 2012) and American Captivity Narratives: An Anthology (2000). Professor Sayre was awarded the Outstanding Research Career Award in 2013-14, and delivered the Presidential Research Lecture to a packed house in March of 2014.