DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY

Biography

Heather Menefee is a PhD candidate in Native American and U.S. history and a Mellon Cluster Fellow in Native American and Indigenous Studies. Her research interests include transformations of Indigenous sovereignty and U.S. citizenship since the mid-19th century, Dakota history, the relationship of federal Indian policy to U.S. imperialism, John Trudell’s political philosophy, and histories of the Great Lakes. In 2022-23 she is a Franke Graduate Fellow at the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities. In addition to her work at NU, she is also an archival intern with Dakhóta Iápi Okhódakičhiye and a teaching assistant for Dakota language courses at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities through the Institute for Advanced Study.

She was previously a doctoral student and Royster Fellow in American Studies at UNC Chapel Hill, where she earned an MA in 2019 and participated in antiracist organizing on campus. In 2015, she earned a BA (summa cum laude) from Northwestern with an ad hoc major in Native American Studies. Heather is happy to share resources with anyone involved in movements for justice and abolition, on or beyond campus. She enjoys the White Sox, choral singing, studying languages, and befriending other people’s dogs.

Publications

• Contributor to the Campuses & Colonialism Symposium, co-hosted by William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies at SMU and Emory University 

• Inaugural cohort of the South Dakota State Historical Society Press Emerging Scholars Research Grant, 2022-23  

• “Black Activist Geographies: Teaching Whiteness as Territoriality on Campus,” south 50:2 (2018).