Native American and indigenous studies; African American studies; settler colonial studies; critical race theory; early American and antebellum U.S. literature and culture

I study political philosophies that Indigenous and African-descended people(s) articulated around the time and place called early America. My work recovers such theories mostly from Anglophone texts that often sought to suppress their imports, arguing that their value is not merely historical as they invite what may now be termed new political possibilities. It asks how political constructs may be rethought, resisted, and repurposed through the perspectives of those whose oppression facilitated their hegemonic development.

In Native Land Talk: Indigenous and Arrivant Rights Theories, I show how Native Americans and African Americans conceptualized belonging and freedom in opposition to settlers' rights discourses.

My current project explores the meanings of such concepts as the world and humanity through similar discrepancies between Eurocentric narratives that were produced in the contexts of empire, colonization, and slavery, and the philosophies and responses of Indigenous and Africa-descended peoples.

Book

Native Land Talk: Indigenous and Arrivant Rights Theories (Dartmouth College Press, 2018).

Articles

“Equiano’s Nativity: Negative Birthright, Indigenous Ethic, and Universal Human Rights.” Early American Literature 48.2 (Summer 2013): 399-423.

“Up and Down with Mary Rowlandson: Erdrich’s and Alexie’s Versions of ‘Captivity.’” Studies in American Indian Literatures 24.4 (Winter 2012): 21-46.

“The Racial Geopolitics of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Geography Textbooks.” Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 29.1 (June 2012): 9-36.

“Ethnography and the Production of Foreignness in Indian Captivity Narratives.” American Indian Quarterly 32.1 (Winter 2008): ix-xxxii.

“Where Did Red Go? Lewis Henry Morgan’s Evolutionary Inheritance and U.S. Racial Imagination.” CR: The New Centennial Review 7.2 (Fall 2007): 201-29.

“Mazes of Empire: Space and Humanity in Crèvecoeur’s Letters.” Early American Literature 42.1 (March 2007): 73-105.

“Clinging to One Spot: Hawthorne’s Native-Born Settlers.” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 52.1-2 (2006): 17-44.

“National Appropriations and Cultural Evolution: The Spatial and Temporal US of Lewis Henry Morgan’s Native America.” Canadian Review of American Studies 33.3 (December 2003): 211-29.

PhD Stanford University, Program in Modern Thought and Literature

BA Tel Aviv University, Department of English

Methodology, Theory, and Criticism in Literary Studies, mandatory MA class
Literature beyond the Nation, MA seminar
Survey of American Literature to 1865, mandatory BA class
Theories of Race, BA seminar
The American Renaissance, BA seminar
Reading Hawthorne, BA elective
Native Americans in 19th Century U.S. Culture, BA elective
Rewriting Discovery, BA elective/seminar