Announcing CNAIR's 2020-21 graduate and faculty fellows

May 14, 2020

CNAIR is delighted to announce its 2020-21 faculty and graduate student fellows.  Fellows will join CNAIR’s community by attending talks, sharing their work, and presenting at the end of year research symposium. 

Graduate Fellows

Ashley Agbasoga, Anthropology
Ashley’s work illuminates how women who identify as Black and with an Indigenous nation engage in placemaking practices that reveal and unsettle notions of race, place, and modern state formation in Mexico.

Bobbie Benevidez, Anthropology
Bobbie works with Indigenous Mayan people to examine the complex relationships between health, culture and environment, focusing in particular on bee keeping practices and medicinal uses of honey.

Cordelia Rizzo, Performance Studies
Cordelia examines Indigenous textile making as both an art and activist form, drawing on the cultural history of textiles in Mexico and co-participation in textile workshops.

Risa Puleo, Art History
Risa’s work investigates how contemporary Indigenous artists posit alternatives to Westerns modes of museum-based and art historical organization.

Faculty Fellow

Doug Kiel, History
Doug will work on his book, Unsettling Territory: Oneida Indian Resurgence and Anti-Sovereignty Backlash, which highlights how enacting decolonial ambitions transforms relationships between Indigenous nations and the United States on local and national scales, highlighting the structural limitations placed upon projects of Indigenous community rebuilding.  Unsettling Territory tells the story of how one Native American community, the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin, bought back so much of their treaty- guaranteed land throughout the twentieth century that the neighboring non-Indian communities perceived the tribe as a threat to their own municipality’s existence.