Modern Critical Theory Lecture Series - Indigenous Studies
Kelly Wisecup specializes in Native American literatures, early American literatures, and science and literature in the Atlantic world. She is the author of two books, Medical Encounters: Knowledge and Identity in Early American Literatures (University of Massachusetts Press, 2013) and of “Good News from New England” by Edward Winslow: A Scholarly Edition (University of Massachusetts Press, 2014). She is currently completing “Assembled Relations: Compilation, Collection, and Native American Writing,” on Native American literary interventions into colonial sciences of collecting. By examining Native compilations, non-narrative genres like lists, catalogs, and scrapbooks, the book charts an untold story about archives, science, and colonialism that shaped uses for and conceptions of Native American literature from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the present.
Hayley Negrin specializes in Native American history, slavery, and the history of women and gender in the Atlantic World. Her current book project investigates the transformation of Indigenous kinship ties and politics under English chattel slavery in early North America. Using a mix of colonial and ethnohistorical sources, she tracks how Southeastern Native American women and children specifically were targeted and trafficked from their own sovereign borders into Carolina and Virginia plantations in the seventeenth century. She considers how they re-imagined community, politics, and relationships to the natural world even while under the deep stress of bondage.
Theresa Montoya is a social scientist and media maker trained in socio-cultural anthropology, critical Indigenous studies, and filmmaking. Her current manuscript project, Permeable: Diné Politics of Extraction and Exposure, approaches territorial dispossession and environmental contamination in and around the Navajo Nation as pervasive features of contemporary Indigenous life. Drawing from Diné (Navajo) oral histories and ethnographic research, her project engages local modes of relating, both in its political and kinship imaginings, to understand the entanglements of railroad “checkerboard” land allotment and contestations over sovereignty and jurisdiction among Diné communities of present-day northern Arizona and New Mexico in relation to these toxic legacies. Beyond her academic work, she has curatorial and museum education experience in various institutions. She is Diné and a citizen of the Navajo Nation
