Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative

Laurel is a second-year Ph.D. student in the Slavic Studies department at Brown University. She completed her bachelor's degree in History at Mississippi State University and her master's in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research focuses on the history of women and gender in Russian Alaska. She applies Indigenous methodologies to this area in hopes of helping decolonize the field of Slavic Studies. This summer, Laurel visited Kodiak Island in Alaska, where she examined museum archives and met with local Alutiiq community members to discuss her research on Kodiak Alutiiq oral histories as a means of rematriating Alutiiq motherhood and birthing practices.