Capping what was already a long and distinguished career, in 2012 Annette Kolodny published In Search of First Contact: The Vikings of Vinland, the Peoples of the Dawnland, and the Anglo-American Anxiety of Discovery (Duke University Press).

The influential magazine Indian Country Today immediately named it as one of the 12 most important books in Native American Studies published in 2012.

[1] She did her undergraduate work at Brooklyn College, from which she graduated Phi Beta Kappa magna cum laude in 1962.

[2] Her first teaching position at Yale University was cut short as she left after a year to move to Canada with her husband, whose draft board appeal for conscientious objector status for the duration of the Vietnam War was rejected.

[3] In New Hampshire, she wrote her first major work of feminist eco-criticism, The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters (1975).

While the book got positive reviews and pioneered the field of feminist ecocriticism, Kolodny was denied promotion and tenure in the English Department at the University of New Hampshire.

Following her tenure as dean, which spanned from 1988 to 1993, Kolodny was named College of Humanities Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Arizona.

She retired from the University of Arizona in July 2007 and has continued an active professional life as a consultant in higher education policy issues and as a scholar of American literature and culture.

"[4] The book also examines the status of the humanities disciplines in higher education, the value of tenure, and the need for family friendly policies on campus.

Nicolar's work traces the history of his people, the Penobscot Nation, from the first moments of creation through the arrival of the white man.

In 2012, Kolodny published In Search of First Contact: The Vikings of Vinland, the Peoples of the Dawnland, and the Anglo-American Anxiety of Discovery (Duke University Press).

The projection of female imagery onto the landscape was essential to its colonization, she argued; in her introduction, she asks, "was there perhaps a need to experience the land as a nurturing, giving maternal breast because of the threatening, alien, and potentially emasculating terror of the unknown?"

With these metaphors firmly in sight, the colonists had a framework through which to view the vast stretches of North America as less alien and terrifying.

Different chapters of the book correspond to different chronological eras after the discovery and colonization of the Americas and to different metaphorical mindsets as manifested in the writings of the authors considered.

Finally, chapter 5, "Making It with Paradise: The Twentieth Century", deals with the increase of industrialization and the yearning both "to return to and to master the beautiful and bountiful femininity of the new continent."

But the emphases were different…Avoiding for a time male assertions of a rediscovered Eden, women claimed the frontiers as a potential sanctuary for an idealized domesticity.

The first section is titled "Book One: From Captivity to Accommodation, 1630-1833", and traces the writings of and about women as they moved from captivity both literal (Mary Rowlandson's account of being captured by Native Americans) and figurative (the sense of being forcibly confined in a new and strange land) to adaptation in the form of survival skills, such as those reputedly possessed by Rebecca Boone, the wife of Daniel Boone.

The third and final section, "Book Three: Repossessing Eden, 1850–1860", documents the attempts by women to create a familiar order in a still unfamiliar country.

Ecofeminists theorize that a culture based on dominating women is directly connected to social ideals that promote the environmental abuse of the earth.

The feminization of the land and the images of the earth as a passive, giving female figure show the social ideas that ecofeminism protests against.

"[4] In "Dancing Through the Minefield", Kolodny applies this theory to the literary canon, those works of literature that are considered appropriate for study.

Pluralism in this context refers to a conscious effort not to limit oneself to a single critical approach when reading a text.

Rather, the object of pluralism is to make use of multiple critical approaches and to get a fuller appreciation of the variety of meanings which can be present in a single text.

This is a common criticism of second-wave feminism: that it tended to ignore the problems of non-white and non-heterosexual women in favor of a homogenized white heterosexual feminist culture.

After serving as dean of Humanities for five years at the University of Arizona, Kolodny wrote this book in order to outline some of the problems facing academic institutions.

These include the ability of legislators and administrators to make uninformed decisions about budget cuts without realizing the effect of such cuts on quality education; a myriad of problems about tenure and promotions processes, which Kolodny believes still reflect an attitude antagonistic to women or ethnic minorities; a problem with anti-feminist and anti-intellectual harassment; the lack of support available for students with children; the extent to which women and non-whites are still considered outsiders on university campuses; and the effect of an outdated curriculum in the face of greater demographic diversity and changing student learning needs.