NAISA

Biographical Statement

Jodi A. Byrd is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma and an Assistant Professor of American Indian Studies and English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  Prior to joining her colleagues at Illinois, she was an Assistant Professor of Indigenous Politics in the Political Science department at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa.  She is the author of “‘Living My Native Life Deadly:’ Red Lake, Ward Churchill, and the Discourses of Competing Genocides” in American Indian Quarterly 31.2 (Spring 2007), “‘In the City of Blinding Lights:’ Indigeneity, Cultural Studies, and the Errants of Colonial Nostalgia” in Cultural Studies Review 15.2 (September 2009), and “‘Been to the Nation, Lord, But I Couldn’t Stay There:’ American Indian Sovereignty, Cherokee Freedmen, and the Incommensurability of the Internal” Interventions 13.1 (Spring 2011).  Her book, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism is forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press in Fall 2011.