Profile

Kirby Brown is an Associate Professor of Native American and Indigenous literary and cultural production in the Department of English and the Director of Native American and Indigenous Studies at the University of Oregon. He is an enrolled citizen of Cherokee Nation through his maternal grandfather, Henry Starr.

Kirby received his PhD in English with a certificate in Native American and Indigenous Studies from the University of Texas at Austin in 2012. His research and teaching interests include Native American literary, intellectual, and cultural production from the late eighteenth century to the present, Indigenous critical theory, and studies in sovereignty/self-determination, nationhood/nationalism, modernism/modernity, and genre. Essays in contemporary Indigenous critical theory, constitutional criticism in Native literatures, and Native interventions in the Western and in Modernist Studies have appeared in a variety of venues including Studies in American Indian Literatures, The Routledge Companion to Native American Literature, Texas Studies in Language and Literatures, Western American Literature, and Modernism/modernity. 

Kirby's book, Stoking the Fire: Nationhood in Cherokee Writing, 1907-1970 (University of Oklahoma Press, 2018), examines how four Cherokee writers variously remembered, imagined and enacted Cherokee nationhood in the period between Oklahoma statehood in 1907 and tribal reorganization in the early 1970s. It was awarded an Andrew W. Mellon grant in 2018, earned the Thomas J. Lyons Award for best monograph in Western American Literary Studies by the Western Literature Association in 2019, and received Honorable Mention for Studies in Native American Literatures, Cultures, and Languages by the Modern Language Association in 2020. Kirby is also co-editor, along with Stephen Ross and Alana Sayers, of two projects: Print-Plus cluster of six essays on "Indigenous Modernities" for Modernism/modernity journal, and the Routledge Handbook to North American Indigenous Modernisms (Routledge Press, 2022), the latter of which was awarded Best Edition, Anthology, or Essay Collection by the Modernist Studies Association in 2023. More recent work includes an essay on the politics of form in the short fiction of Ruth Muskrat Bronson for the Routledge Companion to Gender and the American West, which was awarded the Beatrice Medicine Award for Best Essay by the Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures; an afterword for an edited collection of the writings of Ora Eddleman Reed with University of Nebraska Press (2024); an essay on Cherokee literary nationalism and historiography for Transmotion journal; and ongoing research on Cherokee history, story, modernity, and kinship refracted through family archives and stories. 

At the University of Oregon, Kirby has also participated in a number of programming intiiatives as co-organizer of two conferences, "Alternative Sovereignties: Decolonization Through Indigenous Vision and Struggle" and "Engaged Humanities: Partnerships between Academia and Tribal Communities," and co-curator of a UO Libraries exhibit on the Sac and Fox Olypian and athlete Jim Thorpe. He is also a faculty co-director for the Native American and Indigenous Studies Academic Residential Community, an advisor for the UO/Otago Indigenous Cultural Exchange program, and a founding member of the UO Native Strategies Group. Additionally, Kirby serves on faculty advisory boards for the Graduate School, the Provost’s Environment Initiative, the Oregon Humanities Center, the Center for the Study of Women & Society, and the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art. 

In 2010-11, Kirby served as a dissertation fellow for the Harry Ransom Center for the Humanities at the University of Texas at Austin and was named an American Council for Learned Societies dissertation fellow in 2011-12. In 2014-15, he was named an Oregon Humanities Center Faculty Fellow and was recognized with a Tykeson Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in 2016. In 2019, Brown was named as one of two inaugural speakers for the UO Authors Book Talk Series and was also recognized as one of two Norman H. Brown Faculty Fellows in research, teaching, and service in the College of Arts Sciences for 2019-21. In spring 2023, Kirby was awarded the Ersted Distinguished Teaching Award for Specialized Pedagogy (read his Ersted profile here) and was named David M. and Nancy L Petrone Faculty Scholar for 2023-2026.