Faculty

NAISI-Affiliated Faculty

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Scott AnderBois

  • Associate 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]
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Geri Augusto

  • Senior Fellow in International and Public Affairs and Director of Undergraduate Development Studies, Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs; Faculty Associate, Ruth J. Simmons Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice; affiliated with Native American and Indigenous Studies, Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Portuguese & Brazilian Studies, and Science, Technology & Society
  • Focus: epistemologies of practice and the dynamics of knowledge in pluralist societies marked by power inequalities. Her current interests are science and technology policy and higher education policy in the Global South; the interaction between the technosciences, indigenous knowledges, and knowledges of the enslaved, particularly in Southern Africa, Brazil, the US, and the Caribbean; black transnationalism; and the conjunction of visuality, orality and digitality in African diasporic social movement websites.
  • [email protected]
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Nathaniel Berman

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

  • Brooke Russell Astor Professor of Humanities, Professor of Religious Studies
  • Mark Cladis's research and teaching pertains to religion, environmental justice, and Indigenous ecologies. His NAIS-related courses include "Indigenous Ecologies" and “Religion Gone Wild" (which has a 4-week section focused on North American and Australian Indigenous spiritual/cultural perspectives on the nexus between the human and the more-than-human).
  •  [email protected]
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Sarah dAngelo

  • 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] 
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Bathsheba Demuth

  • Dean’s Associate Professor of History and Environment and Society
  • 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]
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Kevin Escudero

  • Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnic Studies; affiliated with the Department of Sociology, Population Studies and Training Center, and the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative
  • 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]
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Paja Faudree

  • Associate Professor of Anthropology; affiliated with the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and Center for the Study and Race and Ethnicity Studies 
  • Focus: language and politics, indigenous literary and social movements, the interface between music and language, the ethnohistory of New World colonization, and the global marketing of indigenous rights discourses, indigenous knowledge, and plants. 
  • [email protected] 
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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. He is also the principal investigator of the Stolen Relations: Recovering Stories of Indigenous Enslavement in the Americas project, which is a tribal community-centered collaborative project that seeks to create a public, centralized database of Native slavery throughout the Americas and across time. 
  • [email protected]
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Stephen Houston

  • Dupee Family Professor of Social Science, Professor of Anthropology, Professor of History of Art and Architecture
  • 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]
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Evelyn Hu-Dehart

  • Professor of History, Professor of American Studies; Director, Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America
  • 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]
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Adrienne Keene (Cherokee Nation)

  • Joukowsky Family Assistant Professor of American Studies, Assistant Professor of Ethnic 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]
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Jessaca Leinaweaver

  • Professor of Anthropology, Chair 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]
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Amanda Lynch

  • Sloan And George Lindeman Jr. Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies, Professor of Environment and Society and Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences
  • Her research focuses on the intersection between atmospheric science and environmental governance, with particular interests in the Arctic as a place that expresses convergences of rapid change in natural and human systems.
  • [email protected]
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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]
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Iris Montero

  • 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]
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Jeremy R. Mumford

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Robert W. Preucel

  • James Manning Professor 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]
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Jeffrey Proulx

  • Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior (Research),  Assistant Professor of Behavioral and Social Sciences (Research)
  • ​Jeffrey Proulx's research focuses on addressing health outcomes in underserved communities through culturally-adapted mindfulness classes that reflect the cultures of the people he is serving. Although Dr. Proulx's work is designed to address health outcomes, such as diabetes and dementia in Native American communities, his work is also designed to highlight cultural methods of living and healing as a means of cultural revival.
  • [email protected]
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Patricia Rubertone

  • Professor of Anthropology
  • Patricia Rubertone’s research and teaching navigates the intersections of anthropology (especially, anthropological archaeology), and history to explore indigenous and settler colonial experiences, landscape and memory, and representations of modernity in the Native Northeast. Her research on Providence challenges myths of Native American disappearance and urban life by re-envisioning this city’s past through the everyday experiences of Indigenous people. She teaches a course on “Settler Colonialism in the Native Northeast” about the intertwined histories of the region’s peoples as viewed from the perspectives of settler colonialism and survivance. Her new course, “Archaeology of Settler Colonialism,” considers settler colonialism and resistances within a global comparative framework with emphasis on North America.
  • [email protected]
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Neil Safier

  • Associate Professor of History; affiliated with the Department of Hispanic Studies, the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society, the Program in Science, Technology, and Society, the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative, and the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies
  • Focus: 18th-century European colonialism, Brazil, South America, transnational history of knowledge-making in the late-eighteenth-century Atlantic world and the connections between plantation cultures of the eighteenth-century Caribbean and Brazilian natural history, including sugar, indigo, coffee, and cotton. 
  • [email protected]
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Andrew Scherer

  • Associate Professor of Anthropology
  • Andrew Scherer is an archaeologist and biological anthropologist whose research focuses on the pre-colonial Maya of Mexico and Guatemala. He currently co-directs archaeological research at the site of Lacanja Tzeltal, Chiapas, Mexico, which involves collaboration with the local Indigenous community of the same name. Lacanja Tzeltal was the seat of the Sak Tz'i' (White Dog) dynasty in the first millenium A.D.. This work is part of a two decades long effort to reconstruct the dynamic history of Maya kingdoms of the Usumacinta River region.
  • [email protected]
Emily Sprague-Klein (Osage Nation)

Emily Sprague-Klein (Osage Nation)

  • Assistant Professor of Chemistry
  • Emily’s work is focused on understanding the mechanistic details of solar energy harvesting across a range of energy, time, and length scales. She develops state-of-the-art optical probes to create ‘molecular movies’ of light activated chemical reaction dynamics in novel substrates with applications to catalysis and renewable energy. Her work encourages Indigenous knowledge and the stewardship of Native Lands for community-driven solutions towards a just and equitable energy transition. Emily (Osage) also practices culturally sensitive approaches towards mentorship in chemistry-related disciplines for Native and non-Native students alike.
  • [email protected]
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Christopher Joshua Tucker

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

  • Associate 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]