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.

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'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 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'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 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.

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. 

Professor Hu-DeHart was born in China and immigrated to the United States with her parents when she was 12. As an undergraduate at Stanford University she studied in Brazil on an exchange program. She became fascinated with Latin America and that interest eventually led her to a Ph.D. in Latin American history. She has written two books on the Yaqui, and is now engaged in a large research project on the Asian diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean.

The goal of Professor Hu-DeHart`s diaspora project is to uncover and recover the history of Asian migration to Latin America and the Caribbean, and to document and analyze the contributions of these immigrants to the formation of Latin/Caribbean societies and cultures. It should also contribute towards theorizing diasporas and transnationalism. The importance and timeliness of this research was most recently demonstrated by the election of Alberto Fujimori, son of Japanese immigrants, as president of Peru. Hu-DeHart also hopes that her work will broaden the scope of Asian American studies as well as contribute to an area not well covered within Latin American studies.

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'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'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.

Focus: Indigenous Andean history

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'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.

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’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.

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 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’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.

Focus: international circulation of Indigenous Andean music and imagery

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.