Research
My primary research interests include Native American and Indigenous writing and cultural production from the late eighteenth century to the present, Indigenous critical theory, settler colonialism and decolonization, and studies in nationhood/nationalism, sovereignty/self-determination, modernism/modernity, and genre. More broadly, I am interested in the politics of race, nation, citizenship, belonging, and futurity in Indigenous cultural production and the relationships between narrative form, cultural representation, public policy, law, and lived experience.
My 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.
I am 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), 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 (2024); an afterword for The Selected Works 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.