A. George Bajalia
George Bajalia is Assistant Professor of Anthropology (Anthropology of Muslim Worlds) and is concerned with borderlands, primarily in the Western Mediterranean region. His current book project, Waiting at the Border: Language, Labor, and Infrastructure in the Strait of Gibraltar, dwells on the political, social, and cultural forms that emerge during time spent waiting among cross-border workers and West and Central African immigrants living and working around the Moroccan-Spanish borderlands surrounding Tangier and Ceuta. He is the co-founder and co-director of the Youmein Festival, a 48-hour contemporary art and performance festival and residency in Tangier, Morocco. Throughout his work, he is interested in questions of temporality, circulation and exchange, post-structural semiotics, regional formations, and the practices and politics of boundary-marking, belonging, and difference. He is currently in the early stages of a long-term project investigating notions of return, narratives of possession and dispossession, and land in Ramallah, Palestine and its diasporas. His courses at Wesleyan will critically explore the relationships between anthropology, performance, and curation; migration and borderlands; endurance and the otherwise; and theories of cultural and social change.
Katie Brewer Ball
Katie Brewer Ball is Assistant Professor of Theater Department at Wesleyan University and affiliated faculty in Feminist, Gender & Sexuality Studies. Brewer Ball earned their PhD in Performance Studies at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in 2013. Their research and teaching interests include theater, visual culture, Black and Indigenous thought, feminist theory, queer studies, and psychoanalysis. Their current book project, The Only Way Out Is In: The Racial & Sexual Performance of Escape, traces contemporary literature, theater, and performance works by Glenn Ligon, Tony Kushner, Sharon Hayes, and Junot Díaz. They are also working on a second book project tentatively titled Unsettling Art Criticism which weaves together Indigenous arctic science, contemporary art writing, and concerns around literary form . Their writing has been published in Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, Artforum, WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly, Criticism, RECAPS, Little Joe, Bomb Magazine, Dirty Looks, ASAP/Journal, TDR: The Drama Review, and by BOFFO and ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives.
Abigail Boggs
Abigail Boggs is Assistant Professor of Sociology and affiliated faculty with Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Wesleyan University. She earned her PhD in Cultural Studies at the University of California, Davis and her BA in Women and Gender Studies from Wesleyan University. Boggs is currently revising her first book, tentatively entitled America’s Lure: The Figure of the International Student and the Global U.S. University, which traces a critical genealogy of U.S. higher education as a transnational entity through the regulation and celebration of non-white, non-citizen students in immigration law, state and university administrative polices, and popular culture. Boggs’ work is broadly engaged in the fields of Critical University Studies, Queer and Feminist Studies, Critical Race Studies and Indigenous Studies. Through her work with ISRN she intends to deepen her analysis of how the historical and contemporary work of U.S. higher education has both been conditioned by and formative of the logics of settler colonialism as a durational material and epistemic structure.
Lisa Cohen
Lisa Cohen (Associate Professor, English/Creative Writing & Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies) is the author of All We Know: Three Lives (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). A finalist for the National Book Critics Circle, Lambda Literary, and PEN/Bograd Weld awards, that book troubles questions about archival searches for queer lives and reframes the history of transatlantic modernism. Cohen’s memoirs and poems; her essays on writing, clothes, visual art and media; and her edited interviews have been published in mainstream and experimental literary magazines, scholarly journals, museum catalogues, and anthologies. Her interest in Indigenous Studies is tied in part to the creative project she is currently completing, which explores friendship, grief, and long Enlightenment legacies in the history of HIV/AIDS, taking up historical and current notions of “waste” and decay alongside questions about settlement, naming, and property, as well as working to situate HIV/AIDS in relation to earlier and concurrent epi/pan/syndemics. Other books nearing completion and in progress include a collection of lyric poetry, and a series of essay-conversations about charged articles of clothing—both also part of her long commitment to refiguring toxic assumptions about what and who are called enduring or ephemeral, trivial or important, in history and the present.
Saida Daukeyeva
Saida Daukeyeva is an ethnographer and historian of music in Central Asia and a scholar of Arabic music theory. Her research explores the intersection of sound with social and political geographies in Central Asia, focusing on Kazakh music and expressive culture across borders. Her book-in-progress, based on extensive fieldwork in Kazakhstan and Mongolia, examines the impact of migration, socialist cultural policy, and national revival on dombyra (two-stringed plucked lute) performance among the transnational community of Mongolian Kazakhs. Her monograph Philosophy of Music by Abu Nasr Muhammad Al-Farabi (2002, in Russian) draws on archival studies in Syria to reconstruct the intellectual and cultural background to the music scholarship of Islamic polymath al-Farabi (c. 870-950). She has published on Kazakh traditional and contemporary music and medieval Arabic writings in edited volumes and journals such as Ethnomusicology Forum, Asian Music, and Review of Middle Eastern Studies, and co-edited the award-winning book The Music of Central Asia (2016). A trained harpsichord player, she has also studied the dombyra and the two-stringed bowed lute qyl-qobyz with master musicians in Kazakhstan.
Valeria López Fadul
is an assistant professor of History and Latin American Studies. Her research interests include early modern Spanish and colonial Latin American intellectual and cultural history, philosophy of language, and history of science. Her book project, The Cradle of Words: Languages, Knowledge and Governance in the Spanish Empire, reconstructs the beliefs and practices with which scholars, missionaries and crown officials confronted the challenge of governing a vast, multilingual and transoceanic empire. It shows that scholars and administrators routinely approached the empire’s multiple tongues as rich archives of local knowledge. The Spanish Crown sponsored scientific expeditions, comprehensive censuses, local and universal histories, and the creation of libraries. These projects sought to collectively master the human and natural history of the Indies by excavating linguistic and visual evidence, much of which was acquired orally through the interrogation of indigenous informants. By relying on the testimonies of local authorities early modern scholars replicated in the realm of knowledge production Spain’s well-known commitment to a decentralized and composite administrative model that brought together information while preserving its local specificity. López Fadul received a B.A. from Yale University and a Ph.D. from Princeton University. Before coming to Wesleyan, she was a Provost’s Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of Chicago, a scholar in residence at the Newberry Library, and a research fellow at the John Carter Brown Library in Providence, Rhode Island.
Yaniv Feller
Yaniv Feller is a scholar of modern Jewish thought and museum studies. His first book manuscript, Jewish Fantasies of Empire: Leo Baeck and the Task of a Minority, analyzes the thought and activities of Leo Baeck, the official leader of German Jews during the Holocaust, in a way that shifts the focus from the nation-state toward imperial constellations and the role they had in shaping modern Jewish philosophy. This project, alongside his work on museums and the fact that he now lives in North America, increasingly turned Yaniv’s thoughts toward the idea of Jewish indigeneity. This includes both how it is used to exclude Jews historically as a minority (as non-natives), and the ways it is being utilized for claims of Jewish native status in Palestine/the State of Israel. His most recent attempt to think these issues was through a comparative analysis of the Jewish Museum Berlin and the National Museum of the American Indian.
Yu-ting Huang
Yu-ting Huang is an assistant professor of East Asian Studies at Wesleyan University. She received a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UCLA in 2015 with a dissertation that explores Asian-indigenous relation in contemporary literatures from Taiwan, Aotearoa New Zealand and Hawai’i. Her current book-length project, tentatively The Other Settler: Place and Belonging in Transpacific Chinese Literature, examines post-WWII narrative fictions from Taiwan, California, and Hawai’i, by authors with settler roots from China. It observes a transpacific literary movement in which non-white settler authors attempt to articulate place-based identity on stolen indigenous lands, in response to the complex interplay between postcolonial nationalism, ethnic minority politics, and indigenous resurgence across the region. She has co-edited a collection of essays, Archiving Settler Colonialism: Culture, Space, and Race (Routledge, 2018), that explores settler colonialism’s textual practices and its transnational scope. Her articles have appeared on Modern Fiction Studies, Verge, and the edited collection Comparatizing Taiwan (Routledge, 2014).
Khalil Anthony Johnson, Jr.
Khalil Anthony Johnson, Jr. is an assistant professor of African American studies at Wesleyan University. He received a B.A. in English Literature from the University of Georgia in 2005 and will receive his PhD in African American Studies and American Studies from Yale University in December 2016. His research specializes in the intertwined histories of the African diaspora and Indigenous people in North America, with emphases on U.S. settler colonialism, education, and counter-hegemonic social movements. Dr. Johnson’s research has received support from numerous institutions, including the Ford Foundation, the National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation, and, most recently, a predoctoral teaching fellowship at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon. His essays and editorials have appeared in American Quarterly, Pacific Historical Review, and The Navajo Times. In 2015, he received recognition from the Western History Association for the year’s best essay on Native American history. His teaching areas include courses in the history of education and U.S. Empire, early African American history, American Indian history, and popular music.
J. Kēhaulani Kauanui (Kanaka Maoli)
Kēhaulani Kauanui is Professor of American Studies and affiliate faculty in Anthropology. She teaches courses on Indigenous studies, critical race studies, settler colonial studies, and anarchist studies. She is the author of Hawaiian Blood: Colonialism and the Politics of Sovereignty and Indigeneity (Duke University Press 2008) and Paradoxes of Hawaiian Sovereignty: Land, Sex, and the Colonial Politics of State Nationalism (Duke University Press 2018). She is also the editor of Speaking of Indigenous Politics: Conversations with Activists, Scholars, and Tribal Leaders (University of Minnesota Press 2018), which emerged from a radio program she produced and hosted for seven years, “Indigenous Politics: From Native New England and Beyond” that was widely syndicated through the Pacific network. Kauanui currently serves as a co-producer for an anarchist politics show called, “Anarchy on Air,” a majority-POC show co-produced with a group of Wesleyan students, which builds on her earlier work on another collaborative anarchist program called “Horizontal Power Hour.” She is also one of the six co-founders of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA). Kauanui is currently completing a book manuscript provisionally titled, “Indigenous Implications: U.S. Settler Colonialism and Palestine Solidarity Politics,” an intervention in how U.S.-based solidarity activists engaged in the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement targeting Israel situate Palestine, and the ethics of challenging one settler colonial state while situated in another.
Jeffers Lennox
Jeffers Lennox received his PhD in 2010 from Dalhousie University (Nova Scotia). His first book, Homelands and Empires: Indigenous Spaces, Imperial Fictions, and Competition for Territory in Northeastern North America, 1690-1763 (University of Toronto Press 2017) explores how the Wabanaki peoples, French settlers, and British colonists used borders, land use, and the language of geography to control territory in what is now Nova Scotia / New Brunswick / Northern Maine. His current book project, North of America: Revolution, British Provinces, and Creating the United States, 1774-1815 (under contract, Yale University Press) argues that America’s founding was heavily influenced by the British provinces and Indigenous nations that refused to be subsumed by the revolutionary experiment. His work has appeared in the Canadian Historical Review, Acadiensis, and The William and Mary Quarterly.
Elizabeth McAlister
Elizabeth McAlister is Professor of Religion at Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT. Her research focuses on Afro-Caribbean religions, transnational migration, neo-pentecostalism, and race theory, with a focus on Haiti. McAlister is author of Rara! Vodou, Power and Performance in Haiti and its Diaspora, a book and CD ( University of California Press, 2002) that is an ethnography of a musical, religious, and political festival. Her second book, Race, Nation, and Religion in the Americas (Oxford University Press, 2004) is a volume co-edited with Henry Goldschmidt, which theorizes race and religion as linked constructs. McAlister has produced albums of Afro-Haitian religious music: Rhythms of Rapture, (Smithsonian Folkways) and Angels in the Mirror (Ellipsis Arts). Her current research examines what she terms “negative and aggressive forms of prayer,” including the “Spiritual Warfare” movement among Native American groups in Oklahoma and other sites. These tribal members extend concerns with recognition, justice, and land into their maximalist, conservative evangelical theologies and prayer practices. In so doing they extend longstanding Native cultural concerns in new ways that produce new tensions and contradictions. Most of her published articles can be found online at: https://works.bepress.com/elizabeth_mcalister/
Michael Meere
Michael Meere is assistant professor of French and Medieval Studies at Wesleyan University. He works on early francophone literature and cultures with a focus on theater and performance studies. As part of his research on the performance of violence in 16th– and 17th-century French-language drama, he is currently writing an article on representations of indigeneity and masculinity in early seventeenth-century “New France,” particularly through the lens of performance, violence, and disability. He has presented this research at the Renaissance Society of America (https://www.rsa.org/), a conference at Cornell University on “Transforming Bodies” (as part of the Early Modern Conversions Project: http://earlymodernconversions.com/), and at University College Dublin (at the annual conference of the Association des études françaises et francophones d’Irlande [ADEFFI]: https://www.adeffi.ie/). His research has been supported by the Fulbright Commission, the Chateaubriand Fellowship, the Society for French Studies, and the Society for Early Modern French Studies.
Wendi Field Murray
Wendi Field Murray is an archaeologist and ethnohistorian specializing in the Northern Plains of North America. Her research interests include museum collections management, archaeology of community, the personhood of cultural objects, NAGPRA, and archaeological and museum ethics. Her research explores community-building and notions of belonging among the Missouri River tribes after European contact, and examines the role of settlement decision-making in the maintenance of Arikara identity and tradition through the 20th century. She has conducted archaeological and/or ethnographic fieldwork for the Public Archaeology Lab (RI), the Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology (AZ), the National Park Service, and the State Historical Society of North Dakota. She has been managing object collections since 2011. Murray currently manages Wesleyan University’s Archaeology & Anthropology Collection, as well as the East Asian Art & Archival Collection. Her publications can be found in American Ethnologist, Collaborative Anthropologies, Ethnohistory, and Plains Anthropologist. Her current research explores the materiality of indigenous confrontations with assimilative pressures of the American reservation system during the 19th and 20th centuries.
Christian Nakarado (Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians)
Christian Nakarado (Assistant Professor of Art) received his B.A. and Master of Architecture from Yale University in 2007 and 2012, respectively. His research and design work focuses on the aesthetic lifespan of architecture, reciprocal relationships with and obligations to materials and resources, and strategies for de-growth born from traditional ecological knowledge. He is Principal of Slow Built Studio and providing pro bono architectural services to the Saginaw Chippewa Tribal Nation, focusing on the renovation of the historic buildings and site of the former Mount Pleasant Indian Industrial Boarding School on sacred lands in Isabella County, Michigan. Additionally, he is working on a book project entitled Impermanent: Building an Anishinaabe Future for the Great Lakes that proposes ways to transition from heavy, resource-intensive models of building and development to simpler, lighter methods of low-carbon fabrication, including objects that are designed to degrade. Before arriving at Wesleyan, Christian taught at Birmingham School of Architecture and Design.
Jesse Nasta
Jesse Nasta (PhD, Northwestern University; BA, Wesleyan University) is Visiting Assistant Professor in African American Studies who specializes in the cultural-legal construction of race, personal status, and region in the early Republic. His current manuscript project, “Making Slavery’s Borders,” examines how ordinary people, black and white, enslaved and free, gradually gave force and meaning to Congress’s Northwest Ordinance of 1787. Although the Ordinance ostensibly banned slavery in the present-day Midwest, Nasta finds that it was the cross-border movement and the resulting legal claims of those present on the western frontier- black, indigenous, and white- that made a slavery-free West a reality by the mid-19th century. Nasta’s research has received support from the American Historical Association, the Illinois State Historical Society, the Missouri State Archives, and from fellowships at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Hurst Summer Institute in Legal History and Northwestern University’s Center for Historical Studies.
Kristin Oberiano
Kristin Oberiano is assistant professor in the History department. She is a new historian of the United States empire in the Pacific. Oberiano’s research project, tentatively titled Territorial Discontent: Chamorros, Filipinos, and the Making of the United States Empire on Guam, examines the evolution of the political, social, and cultural relations between Indigenous Chamorro people and Filipino migrants under the United States military empire on Guam over the twentieth century. Territorial Discontent engages in frameworks of race, settler colonialism, militarism, and migration within empire. Oberiano teaches courses in twentieth-century US history, the history of the US in the World, US imperialism, Asian and Pacific Islander history, and Pacific history. In addition to her academic roles, Oberiano is the Secretary of Guåhan Sustainable Culture 501(c)(3), a non-profit organization dedicated to food sovereignty on Guam. Oberiano was born to and raised by Filipino immigrant families in Guam.
Paula Park
Paula Park is an assistant professor of Spanish in the department of Romance Languages and in the Latin American Studies program. Her current research focuses on connections and collaborations between the Rapa Nui, other Native Pacific Islanders, and Caribbean writers and artists. This is part of an initiative to engage more with Pacific Island Studies as a Latin Americanist interested in transpacific perspectives. The latter is reflected in her first book, Intercolonial Intimacies: Relinking Latin/o America to the Philippines, 1898-1964 (U of Pittsburgh P, forthcoming in 2022). Paula teaches a variety of courses on Latin American and Hispanic Caribbean literatures and cultures at Wesleyan, among them a seminar called “Multilingual Aesthetics in Latin America,” which centers largely on “indigenismo” and also surveys contemporary indigenous writers from Latin America.
Joel Pfister
Joel Pfister is Olin Professor of American Studies and English. Among the six books he has written are Individuality Incorporated: Indians and the Multicultural Modern (Duke University Press, 2004) and The Yale Indian: The Education of Henry Roe Cloud(Duke University Press, 2009). Individuality Incorporatedwas supported by a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship to be in residence at the “Bellagio Center” at the Villa Serbelloni in Lake Como (2000) and The Yale Indianwas supported by a Mellon Fellowship Summer Stipend (2008). These books—rooted in extensive archival research—are novel contributions to Indian-white history and even more expansively the history of changing strategies of what has been labeled capitalism’s “diversity management” for two reasons. Both books place parts of Indian-white history in historical-theoretical conversations with still-emerging histories of (cultural formations of) emotional life, subjectivity, and “individuality.” Also, both books put the analysis of American Indian racialization and “assimilation” in dialogue with the history of class and class-identity formation. Readings of several American Indian authors enhanced his most recent book, Surveyors of Customs: American Literature as Cultural Analysis (Oxford University Press, 2016). His current book project is tentatively titled, Entertaining Social Change: American Movies and the Critical Uses of Soft Capitalism, and here he is interested partly in how American Indian filmmakers have used movies to popularize their social critiques (what Stuart Hall would term hegemonizing–or counterhegemonizing).
Stephanie Elliott Prieto
is the publicist and web manager at Wesleyan University Press where she’s organized events and promoted books for Gerald Vizenor, Joy Harjo, and others. She built and maintains the website GeraldVizenor.site.wesleyan.edu and volunteers as a member of Russell Library’s film committee. Her poetry’s been published in Bottle Rockets, Christian Science Monitor, and Yellow Medicine Review.
Mary-Jane Rubenstein
Mary-Jane Rubenstein teaches in the Religion Department and Science in Society Program at Wesleyan. Her areas of research include continental philosophy, gender and sexuality studies, science and religion, and the history and philosophy of physics, ecology, and cosmology. She is the author of Strange Wonder: The Closure of Metaphysics and the Opening of Awe (2009) Worlds without End: The Many Lives of the Multiverse (2014), and Pantheologies: Gods, Worlds, Monsters (2018). She is also co-editor with Catherine Keller of Entangled Worlds: Religion, Science, and New Materialisms (2017) and co-author with Thomas A. Carlson and Mark C. Taylor of Image: Three Inquiries in Technology and Imagination (2021). Her book in progress is called Astrotopia: The Dangerous Religion of the New Space, and seeks to counter the ecocidal messianisms of the corporate space race with Indigenous and “heretical” Western ontologies and politics.
Justine Buck Quijada
Justine Buck Quijada is Assistant Professor in the Department of Religion. Her research is on Post-Soviet religious revival among Buryats, a Mongolian indigenous population in Siberia. Her forthcoming book, Buddhists, Shamans and Soviets: Rituals of History in Post-Soviet Buryatia (forthcoming, Oxford University Press), argues that religious rituals became a place for this indigenous minority to re-imagine their history, and through history, their identity. Her ongoing research examines an urban Buryat shaman’s organization, and the way in which global New Age interest impacts the conditions under which indigenous Siberian shamans practice. In Spring 2017 she taught a seminar at Wesleyan’s Center for Humanities on the cultural logic of New Age Appropriation of Indigenous Religion (RELI 312).
Roberto Saba
Roberto Saba received his BA (2007) and MA (2010) in history from the Universidade de São Paulo. In 2017, he received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. He subsequently held the Hench Postdoctoral Fellowship at the American Antiquarian Society and the Henry G. Fairbanks Visiting Humanities Scholar-in-Residence position at Saint Michael’s College. He is currently assistant professor of American Studies at Wesleyan University. He has published articles in the United States and Brazil, including a study of Confederate migration to Brazil after the American Civil War for Traversea: Journal of Transatlantic History. His forthcoming book—American Mirror: The United States and Brazil in the Age of Emancipation (Princeton University Press 2021)—illustrates the crucial role of slave emancipation in the making of capitalism. He is now transitioning to a project that will trace how the American model of westward expansion influenced countries in Latin America, Africa, and Oceania during the long nineteenth century. It will explore how technology, ideology, and expertise from the United States impacted the lives of indigenous populations, rural communities, and migratory workers in various frontier contexts.
Elise Springer
Elise Springer is Associate Professor and Chair of Philosophy. Springer’s first book, Communicating Moral Concern, focuses on how moral concepts and attitudes are constituted and transformed through social encounters, with particular attention to how social-hierarchical norms are challenged. Recent work has focused particularly on how ecological responsibilities are recognized and communicated. This has led to an interest in environmental philosophy and in understanding indigenous accounts of place and of interrelations with non-human beings, and also to a broader interest in critical indigenous voices in philosophy. She has served on the planning and program committee for Feminist Ethics and Social Theory’s 2017 conference, “Indigenizing and Decolonizing Feminist Philosophy.” An additional area of teaching and research interests is the pragmatist tradition in philosophy, including evidence of its appropriation of indigenous ideas.
Steven Stemler
Steve Stemler is an Associate Professor of Psychology and Co-Chair of the College of Education Studies at Wesleyan. He has spent more than two decades systematically studying the purposes of school (elementary through post-secondary) and how those purposes get measured via testing. He and his colleagues have developed a number of innovative new ways of measuring broad constructs such as cultural competence, practical intelligence, citizenship, creativity, and ethical reasoning. Dr. Stemler has more than fifty publications consisting of peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, and a book titled, The School Mission Statement: Values, Goals, and Identities in American Education. He has received more than $500,000 in external funding for his work. Professor Stemler has taught domestically and internationally and has taught at both the undergraduate and graduate level. Dr. Stemler is currently leading a project content analyzing the mission statements of all 52 schools operated by the Bureau of Indian Education as well as the 135 Tribally controlled schools listed on the BIE website. Through his work with ISRN he hopes to deepen his analysis of how the historical and contemporary purposes of public schooling in the US relate to those of tribal schools. He graduated with a B.S. in Psychology from the University of Washington. He then attained both an M.Ed. and Ph.D. in Educational Research, Measurement, and Evaluation from the Lynch School of Education at Boston College. In 2001, he was appointed as a Postdoctoral Associate at Yale University, where he worked directly with Robert J. Sternberg (then president of the American Psychological Association) and ultimately joined the research faculty at Yale as an Associate Research Scientist and became the Assistant Director of the Center for the Psychology of Abilities, Competencies, and Expertise (PACE Center). In 2005, Professor Stemler joined the faculty at Wesleyan University.
Nikos Valance
Nikos Valance (Visiting Assistant Professor in Economics) has degrees in both economics and law. His legal work is currently focused on International Human Rights and Native American legal issues with specific emphasis on economic development, tribal justice and natural resources, and particularly tribal water rights. He has worked as a consultant to the Office of the Attorney General of the San Carlos Apache Nation in Arizona and with the Indigenous Economic Development and Sustainability Fund in Tucson, Arizona. He has also worked on antitrust, and on securities fraud. Nikos comes to Wesleyan from the University of Saint Joseph in West Hartford, where he was the Director of the Program in Criminal and Restorative Justice. He has a Master’s degree in Economics from The New School for Social Research, a J.D. from Fordham University and an LL.M. in Indigenous People’s Law and Policy from the University of Arizona, Rogers College of Law.
Joseph Weiss
Joseph Weiss is Assistant Professor of Anthropology. His work explores the intersections between time, ecology, and Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination. Dr. Weiss has been conducting fieldwork with the Haida community of Old Massett since 2010, where has also worked as a full-time volunteer teaching assistant and occasional school play director. His first book, Shaping the Future on Haida Gwaii: Life Beyond Settler Colonialism (University of British Columbia Press, 2018) is based on this fieldwork, exploring how the Indigenous Haida Nation in Western Canada addresses political and social change through a series of different future-oriented cultural strategies. Dr. Weiss’s current research projects include a comparative exploration of the ways in which military occupations conceal themselves under settler colonialism, and a new project that examines the production of alternative modes of solidarity between the Republic of Ireland and Indigenous communities in North America. He also maintains abiding interests in commissions of inquiry, the production of political legitimacy, and research ethics in the social sciences. His research has been funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the American Philosophical Society, the Canadian Museum of History, and the University of Chicago. Dr. Weiss is formerly Curator of Western Ethnology at the Canadian Museum of History.