NAISAB 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
  • Focus: colonial America, the Atlantic World, American Indians (especially the contact period through the end of the eighteenth century), material culture, the history of slavery, and the history of religion in America
  • [email protected]

Elizabeth Hoover

  • Assistant Professor of American Studies 
  • Focus: Native American environmental health, Native American food movements, community based participatory research, indigenous museum curation 
  • [email protected]

Shankar Prasad

Robert W. Preucel

  • Professor, Department of Anthropology
  • Director, Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology
  • Focus: Indigeneity, indigenous archaeology, representational practices, museums, sovereignty, NAGPRA
  • [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
NAIS General Faculty

Scott AnderBois

  • Assistant Professor of Cognitive, Linguistic and Psychological Sciences
  • Focus: Linguistic semantic pragmatics, Yucatec Maya
  • [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
  • Focus: Native Peoples and the environment
  •  [email protected]

Robert Douglas Cope

  • Associate Professor of History
  • Focus: Multi-ethnic societies in Mexico and Latin America
  • [email protected]

Sarah dAngelo

  • Assistant Professor of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies
  • Focus: Indigenous and non-western performance practices, contemporary Native American Theatre, solo performance and multi-media performance

  • [email protected] 

Bathsheba Demuth

  • Assistant Professor of History
  • Focus: Environment, Russia and North American Arctic 
  • [email protected]

Stephen Houston

  • Dupee Family Professor of Social Science and Professor of Anthropology and Archaeology
  • Focus: Maya archaeology and writing; Pre-columbian civilizations of Latin America; ancient writing and imagery; historical linguistics of the New World; comparative studies of kings, courts, and aristocracy; indigenous concepts of materials 
  • [email protected]

Evelyn Hu-Dehart

  • Professor of History, Ethnic Studies, and American Studies
  • Focus: Yaqui Indian History
  • [email protected]

Karla Kaun

  • Robert J and Nancy D Carney Assistant Professor of Neuroscience

  • Focus: molecular and neural mechanisms underlying drug addiction​

  • [email protected]

Adrienne Keene

  • Assistant Professor of American Studies
  • Focus: Native American education, cultural appropriation
  • [email protected]

Jessaca Leinaweaver

  • Associate Professsor of Anthropology, Director of Latin American and Caribbean Studies
  • Focus: Peru and the Peruvian diaspora

  • [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] email icon

Jeremy R. Mumford

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
  • Focus: Classic period Maya, political and social organization, ritual and religion, diet and health
  • [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
  • Focus: Space and landscape, political subjectivity, colonialism, GIS and Spatial Analysis, ceramics, Andes​
  • [email protected]