Faculty

NAISI CORE Steering Committee

Shankar Prasad

Sarah dAngelo

  • Faculty Co-Chair
  • Assistant Professor of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies
  • Sarah dAngelo's creative interests and scholarship centers on the development and production of new Indigenous plays for and by Indigenous voices. Whether it is a professional production, an edited collection of new plays or a dramaturgical commentary, her practice and scholarship amplifies presence through the continuance of Indigenous stories on the American stage.  

  • [email protected] 

Adrienne Keene (Cherokee Nation)

  • Faculty Co-Chair
  • Assistant Professor of American Studies
  • Adrienne's work is engaged with questions of creating Indigenous futures through higher education, specifically thinking through the role of college in projects of Indigenous nation building. She also examines the importance of representations in allowing for Indigenous imaginings and reimaginings of history, present, and future, and how cultural appropriation, stereotypes, and misrepresentations conflict with assertions of Indigenous knowledges and sovereignty.
  • [email protected]

Joseph Meisel

  • Joukowsky Family University Librarian
  • Adjunct Associate Professor of History
  • Member of the Royal Historical Society
  • Under Joe Meisel’s leadership, the University Library is working closely with the Initiative to strengthen collections and other resources for research and teaching in Native American and Indigenous Studies.
  • [email protected]
NAISI Steering Committee

Paja Faudree

  • Associate Professor of Anthropology
  • Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and Center for the Study and Race and Ethnicity Studies 
  • Focus: indigenous social movements Latin America; indigenous politics; indigenous languages and literatures; indigenous plant and medicinal knowledge; New World ethnohistory and the politics of writing 
  • [email protected]

Linford Fisher

  • Associate Professor of History
  • Linford Fisher's research on Colonial America, the Atlantic World, American Indians, material culture, the history of slavery, and the history of religion in America has led to two projects of interest to Native American peoples that illuminate the importance of their ancestors’ enslavements as a result of colonialism. The first is a monograph based on archival sources, interviews, and oral-historical sources to reconstruct the enslavement of Natives in English colonies and, later, the United States. The second is a digital humanities project -- Database of Indigenous Slavery in the Americas (DISA) -- involving local Native communities focused on understanding and sensitively presenting histories of Native enslavement in ways that are useful and meaningful to these communities and the wider public. 
  • [email protected]

Robert W. Preucel

  • Professor, Department of Anthropology
  • Director, Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology
  • Robert Preucel’s research focuses on the history and significance of archaeological resources related to Cochiti Pueblo, New Mexico. He began work with Cochiti in 1996 and together with the tribe they gathered information on their Pueblo Revolt village, Hanat Kotyiti, which resulted in a land return in 2004.​
  • [email protected]

Neil Safier

  • Beatrice and Julio Mario Santo Domingo Director and Librarian at The John Carter Brown Library
  • Associate Professor of History
  • Focus: 18th-century European colonialism, Brazil, South America
  • [email protected]
NAIS General Faculty

Scott AnderBois

  • Assistant Professor of Cognitive, Linguistic and Psychological Sciences
  • Language documentation is a form of scholarship that requires significant community engagement. In his work, Scott AnderBois seeks to support indigenous scholars, and also contribute to capacity building in indigenous communities, involving native speakers throughout the research process.​
  • [email protected]

Geri Augusto

  • Gerard Visiting Associate Professor of International and Public Affairs and Africana Studies, Watson Institute Faculty Fellow, and Visiting Faculty Fellow at the Institute at Brown  for  Environment & Society (IBES)
  • Focus: Knowledge of the enslaved, indigenous knowledge studies, epistemic interaction, colonial botany, indigenous medico-botanical knowledges in Southern Africa and the African diaspora
  • [email protected]

Nathaniel Berman

  • Rahel Varnhagen Professor of International Affairs, Law, and Modern Culture – Cogut Center for the Humanities
  • Focus: Construction of modern internationalism through its relationships to nationalism, colonialism, and religion; Indigenous Peoples in International and U.S. Law
  • [email protected]

Mark Cladis

  • Professor of Religious Studies
  • Mark Cladis's research and teaching pertains to religion, environmental justice, and indigenous ecology. His course, “Religion Gone Wild,” has a lengthy section focused on North American and Australian indigenous spiritual/cultural perspectives on the nexus between the human and the more-than-human.​
  •  [email protected]

Bathsheba Demuth

  • Assistant Professor of History
  • Several of Bathsheba Demuth’s courses, including her Arctic history seminar, her global environmental history lecture, and her energy history lecture, center Indigenous epistemologies and knowledge practices. Her scholarship strives for the same, while creating work accessible to a broad audience both within and outside Native communities. ​
  • [email protected]

Kevin Escudero

  • Assistant Professor of American Studies
  • Kevin Escudero's research and teaching focus on Indigenous and immigrant social movements working toward manifesting a decolonized future for all community members. His current project examines the historical and contemporary political activism of Indigenous and immigrant communities in Oceania, particularly in the Mariana Islands (Guam and the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands).
  • [email protected]

Stephen Houston

  • Dupee Family Professor of Social Science and Professor of Anthropology and Archaeology
  • Many of Stephen Houston’s classes concern the civilizations of ancient Mesoamerica (Mexico and northern Central America), especially that of the Maya and their royal courts, cities, visual culture, and systems of writing. All of these peoples, from the Maya to the Aztec, were indigenous to the Americas.​
  • [email protected]

Evelyn Hu-Dehart

  • Professor of History, Ethnic Studies, and American Studies
  • Evelyn Hu-Dehart’s research and teaching concerns the Yaqui nation of the US-Mexico borderlands, Native history and issues of the US Mexico Border and Mexican Revolution.​
  • [email protected]

Karla Kaun

  • Robert J and Nancy D Carney Assistant Professor of Neuroscience

  • Focus: molecular and neural mechanisms underlying drug addiction​

  • [email protected]

Jessaca Leinaweaver

  • Associate Professsor of Anthropology​
  • Jessaca Leinaweaver's research with indigenous Andean Quechua speakers in southern Peru has focused on families, children, elders, and rural-to-urban migration. She's also published about how Latin Americans, including Native Latin Americans, are represented in Spain.​

  • [email protected]

Amanda Lynch

  • Professor of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences and Environment and Society; Director of the Brown Institute for Environment and Society
  • Focus: Indigenous knowledge, global change
  • [email protected] 

Iris Montero

  • Visiting Assistant Professor of Hispanic Studies
  • Iris Montero's research focuses on indigenous epistemologies and memory keeping practices of the Nahua peoples, from pre-Columbian to contemporary times. Her courses "The Nature of Conquest" and "Visions and Voices of Indigenous Mexico" center the revalorization of indigenous ways of knowing in and beyond indigenous communities. She is also invested in linguistic revitalization, particularly amongst Nahuatl speakers in Mexico and the United States.
  • [email protected]

Jeremy R. Mumford

Jeffrey Proulx

Patricia Rubertone

  • Professor of Anthropology
  • Focus: Indigenous Archaeology; Colonialism; Commemoration, Representation, and Native American History; Urban [Indian] Homelands; North America, especially, New England 
  • [email protected]

Andrew Scherer

  • Associate Professor of Anthropology and Archaeology
  • Undergraduate Advisor; Anthropology
  • The archaeological project that Andrew Scherer directs involves collaboration with an indigenous community (Lacanja Tzeltal) in Chiapas, Mexico. Although his research is focused on the Classic period Maya, the process of archaeology has implications for contemporary indigenous folks. More broadly, he is tuned in to indigenous issues in Mexico and Guatemala and minored in Native American studies as an undergraduate, and is therefore mindful of the points of articulation and friction between anthropology and Indigenous studies.​
  • [email protected]

Christopher Joshua Tucker

  • Assistant Professor of Music
  • Focus: international circulation of indigenous Andean music and imagery
  • [email protected]

Parker VanValkenburgh

  • Assistant Professor of Anthropology
  • Parker VanValkenburgh is engaged in Native American and Indigenous Studies through work on the ways in which indigeneity (primarily, in western South America) has been produced through colonial discourse. He is particularly engaged in understanding colonial period forced resettlement and its long-term effects on indigenous communities, as well as in the politics of archaeology in Peru.​
  • [email protected]