DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY

Biography

Grace Ellis is a doctoral student in Native American and U.S. history and a Mellon Cluster Fellow in Native American and Indigenous Studies. She studies education as a central battleground where settler and Native actors contested the territorial and political limits of U.S. power.

Her research has examined how popular U.S. history textbooks reproduced mythologies of Indigenous disappearance throughout the twentieth century. She is particularly interested in how Native educators, often women, developed counternarratives foregrounding Indigenous presence. Her broader research interests include national identity, Indigenous sovereignty, and the histories of Indian Territory, Oklahoma, and the Choctaw Nation.

Grace holds a B.A. in American Studies from Yale University. Before coming to Northwestern, she worked for the NYU-Yale American Indian Sovereignty Project, where she helped organize a conference that brought together historians and educators from universities and tribal cultural institutions to examine the legacies of the American Revolution for Native nations.