Faculty Hired for Indigenous Studies Research Initiative

Adrian Randolph, dean of the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, announces a cluster of new faculty hires as part of the recently launched Indigenous Studies Research Initiative. Three new colleagues in this area will join Weinberg College in September 2016.

Beth Red Bird will join the faculty of the Department of Sociology, with an additional appointment as a Fellow at the Institute for Policy Research.  Her research uses quantitative, econometric tools to study inequality within and across Native American tribes.

Doug Kiel will join the faculty of the Department of History, with an additional appointment in the Kaplan Institute for the Humanities.  Kiel’s scholarship is on native struggles for economic and political sovereignty, with a particular focus on migrations between Oneida homelands and Chicago, including those of his own family.

Hi’ilei Julia Kawehipua’akaha’opulani Hobart will take up a Postdoctoral Fellowship that is jointly sponsored by the Kaplan Institute for Humanities, the Science in Human Culture Program, and the Asian American Studies Program.  Hobart’s work is in the area of Food Studies; her doctoral research explores the politics of ingestion, representation and materiality in colonial Hawai’i.

The arrival of these new colleagues will help realize our goal of making Northwestern University, as well as greater Chicago, centers of research and learning in the important and emerging field of Native American and Indigenous Studies.