Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative

Emma (Anishinaabekwe/Lènapëxkwe by descent) joined Brown in 2024 as the Program Manager for the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative (NAISI). In this role, Emma oversees financial, administrative, and HR operations, providing comprehensive support for strategic planning, curriculum, and student engagement efforts, including budget, grants, course management, communications and outreach, and faculty appointments. She is also responsible for managing the NAISI website, social media, and undergraduate assistants, as well as coordinating office logistics. Additionally, Emma is a mentor through the Brown Collegiate Scholars Program and is a member of the Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning’s Conversation Partners Program.

Emma was born and raised in rural Kansas (Rock Chalk, Jayhawk!), though she has spent much of her adult life in the Native Northeast. She received her B.A. in English and American Studies with concentration in Native American Studies from Amherst College, where she graduated magna cum laude and wrote her senior honors thesis, “Finding a way, again, to the river”: Indigenous Women’s Remembrance through Narratives of Return, Rebirth, and Revitalization. At Amherst, she was a Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellow, a QuestBridge scholar, and the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including but not limited to the Samuel Walley Brown Scholarship and the Obed Finch Singerland Memorial Prize, both awarded by the Amherst College Board of Trustees. 

In 2024, she received her M.A. in Native American and Indigenous Studies from the University of California, Davis, with Phi Kappa Phi distinction. While a graduate student, she worked as a teaching assistant and, in her final semester, as an Associate Instructor in NAIS. Her scholarly interests include the intersections of Indigenous material cultures and literatures, with particular focus on material culture as forms of multimodal storytelling and Indigenous futurity.