Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative

Faculty

Learn more about NAISI-affiliated faculty offering courses that support the undergraduate Critical NAIS concentration on this page.

NAISI Affiliated Faculty

  • Scott AnderBois

    Scott AnderBois

    Associate Professor of Linguistics

    Scott AnderBois' research is focused on community-engaged language documentation, working in collaboration with speakers of A'ingae (an indigenous language isolate of Amazonian Ecuador) and colleagues to create a diverse multimedia, multi-purpose collection of texts and other language materials. Together, they use these materials to further community language goals and to answer scientific questions about the language's grammar and use. These questions vary but are most typically focused on issues in semantics/pragmatics, exploring ways in which principles governing linguistic meaning vary or are constant across languages. He also explores these sorts of semantic and pragmatic questions through work on Yucatec Maya (a Mayan language of southern Mexico, see U koorpusil maaya t'aan, a digital corpus he co-created with Miguel Oscar Chan Dzul), Tagalog, and American English.

  • Geri Augusto

    Geri Augusto

    Senior Fellow in International and Public Affairs, Fulbright Scholar ( Brazil) , Letsema Fellow ( University of Johannesburg)

    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.

  • Mark Cladis

    Mark Cladis

    Brooke Russell Astor Professor of Humanities, 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).

  • Bathsheba Demuth

    Bathsheba Demuth

    Interim Faculty Director, Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative, Dean’s Associate Professor of History and Environment and Society

    Bathsheba Demuth is a writer and environmental historian with long term commitments in the Eurasian and North American Arctic. She is currently working with Alaska Native and First Nation communities in northwestern Canada and Alaska on research into how changes in sovereignty are intertwined with species loss and other environmental change in the Yukon River watershed. Her research and many of her courses center Indigenous epistemologies and histories, and regularly feature guest speakers, Elders, and knowledge keepers from the Arctic and subarctic to share their perspectives and expertise. In 2024-2025, she is the Interim Faculty Director of NAISI at Brown.

  • Kevin Escudero

    Kevin Escudero

    Assistant Professor of American Studies

    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).

  • Paja Faudree

    Paja Faudree

    Associate Professor of Anthropology, Associate Professor of Linguistics

    Paja Faudree is a linguistic anthropologist whose research interests include 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. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania and came to Brown following a Harper-Schmidt Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Social Sciences at the University of Chicago. She is affiliated with Brown's Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, Native American and Indigenous Studies, the Program in Science and Technology Studies, and Development Studies. Professor Faudree teaches courses on language and society, social movements in Latin America, language and politics, language and music, and the anthropology of drugs. She is also a published poet and playwright, and holds an MFA from Brown's literary arts program.

  • Linford Fisher

    Linford Fisher

    Associate Professor of History

    Professor Fisher's research and teaching relate primarily to the cultural and religious history of colonial America and the Atlantic world, including Native Americans, religion, material culture, and Indian and African slavery and servitude. He is currently finishing a history of Native American enslavement in the English colonies and the United States between Columbus and the American Civil War, tentatively titled America Enslaved: The Rise and Fall of Indian Slavery in the English Atlantic and 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. 

  • Christopher Joshua Tucker

    Christopher Joshua Tucker

    Associate Professor of Music

    Focus: international circulation of Indigenous Andean music and imagery

  • Jessaca Leinaweaver

    Jessaca Leinaweaver

    Professor and 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.​

  • Amanda Lynch

    Amanda Lynch

    Lindemann Distinguished Professor of Environment and Society

    Amanda's research and teaching focus on places that express convergences of and challenges from rapid change in climate and human systems. She has collaborated with Traditional Owners in Australia, Indigenous peoples of the Arctic, and communities in southern and western Africa.

  • Iris Montero

    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.

  • Jeremy R. Mumford

    Associate Professor of History

    Focus: Indigenous Andean history

  • Robert W. Preucel

    Professor, Department of Anthropology, Director of 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.​

  • Jeffrey Proulx

    Jeffrey Proulx

    Assistant Professor of Behavioral and Social Sciences, Associate Director Diversity and Inclusion, Mindfulness Center at Brown

    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.

  • Image of Lukas Rieppel

    Lukas Rieppel

    Associate Professor of History

    Lukas Rieppel recently began a new project about the deep history of the 1868 Treaty Lands. Working with Native collaborators on the Pine Ridge Reservation, he is researching traditional knowledge about fossils and other features of the region's natural landscape (especially Makosica, the White River Badlands). In addition, he is also documenting the role played by Earth sciences in colonizing of the northern Great Plains. His courses primarily focus on the history of science, the history of capitalism, and science and technology studies.

  • Patricia Rubertone Headshot

    Patricia Rubertone

    Professor of Anthropology

    Patricia Rubertone’s research and teaching traverse archaeology, anthropology, and history to explore settler colonialism, landscape and memory, and Indigenous survivance. Her geographical focus is the Northeast U.S. where she challenges the myth of Indigenous disappearance and the notion that Indigenous people cannot be modern and urban by revealing their lived experiences. She is committed to examining continuing tactics of spatial and symbolic erasure and their effects on urban Indigenous communities in their struggles as right-bearers to modern cities.

  • Neil Safier

    Neil Safier

    Associate Professor of History

    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. 

  • Andrew Scherer

    Andrew Scherer

    Associate Professor of Anthropology and Archaeology, Director, Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World

    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 among the ancient Maya kingdoms of Piedras Negras, Yaxchilan, and Sak Tz'i' (White Dog). This research involves collaboration with a number of local Indigenous communities. This work is part of a two decades long effort to reconstruct the dynamic history of Maya kingdoms of the Usumacinta River region.

  • Emily Sprague-Klein (Osage Nation)

    Emily Sprague-Klein

    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, renewable energy, public health, and data technology. She engages with tribal communities through STEM research and outreach aimed at bettering our understanding of natural resources, preservation, and land stewardship. Emily (Osage) also practices culturally sensitive approaches for inclusive mentorship in chemistry-related fields.

  • Parker VanValkenburgh

    Parker VanValkenburgh

    Associate Professor of Anthropology, Interim Director of Latin American and Caribbean Studies

    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.