Jodi Byrd

Jodi Byrd holds a master’s degree and Ph.D. (2002) in English literature from the University of Iowa. Her dissertation was Colonialism’s Cacophony: Natives and Arrivants at the Limits of Postcolonial Theory. Before moving to Cornell University, she taught at the University of Illinois Chicago, and before that she was an assistant professor of indigenous politics in the department of political science of the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. She was formerly associated with the American Indian Studies Program at Illinois. She was president of the Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures for 2011–2012. In 2012, she was adopted as a Clan Sister (one of the central organizing members) of the Native American Literature Symposium, which she has stated has been an inspiring community for her since her first days as a graduate student.

Byrd has also served as an editorial board member for the journal Critical Ethnic Studies. Byrd’s 2011 book The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism won the 2011 Best First Book of the Year award from the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA), and the 2012 Wordcraft Circle Award for Academic Work of the Year. Earlier, Byrd won the 2008 Beatrice Medicine Award for Scholarship in American Indian Studies of the Native American Literature Symposium for her paper “Living my native life deadly: Red Lake, Ward Churchill, and the discourses of competing genocides” (American Indian Quarterly, 2007). She recently became an associate professor of Literatures in English at Cornell University, where she also holds an affiliation with the American Studies Program. Her research applies critical theory to indigenous studies and governance, science and technology studies, game studies, indigenous feminism, and indigenous sexualities. She also possesses research interests in American Indian Studies, Post-Colonial Studies, Digital Media, Theory & Criticism.

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