Kirby Brown
Biography
Kirby Brown is an Associate Professor of Native American and Indigenous literary and cultural production in the Department of English and the Director of Native American and Indigenous Studies at the University of Oregon. He is an enrolled citizen of Cherokee Nation through his maternal grandfather, Henry Starr.
Kirby received his PhD in English with a certificate in Native American and Indigenous Studies from the University of Texas at Austin in 2012. His research and teaching interests include Native American literary, intellectual, and cultural production from the late eighteenth century to the present, Indigenous critical theory, and studies in sovereignty/self-determination, nationhood/nationalism, modernism/modernity, and genre. Essays in contemporary Indigenous critical theory, constitutional criticism in Native literatures, and Native interventions in the Western and in Modernist Studies have appeared in a variety of venues including Studies in American Indian Literatures, The Routledge Companion to Native American Literature, Texas Studies in Language and Literatures, Western American Literature, and Modernism/modernity.
Kirby's book, Stoking the Fire: Nationhood in Cherokee Writing, 1907-1970 (University of Oklahoma Press, 2018), examines how four Cherokee writers variously remembered, imagined and enacted Cherokee nationhood in the period between Oklahoma statehood in 1907 and tribal reorganization in the early 1970s. It was awarded an Andrew W. Mellon grant in 2018, earned the Thomas J. Lyons Award for best monograph in Western American Literary Studies by the Western Literature Association in 2019, and received Honorable Mention for Studies in Native American Literatures, Cultures, and Languages by the Modern Language Association in 2020. Kirby is also co-editor, along with Stephen Ross and Alana Sayers, of two projects: Print-Plus cluster of six essays on "Indigenous Modernities" for Modernism/modernity journal, and the Routledge Handbook to North American Indigenous Modernisms (Routledge Press, 2022), the latter of which was awarded Best Edition, Anthology, or Essay Collection by the Modernist Studies Association in 2023. More recent work includes an essay on the politics of form in the short fiction of Ruth Muskrat Bronson for the Routledge Companion to Gender and the American West, which was awarded the Beatrice Medicine Award for Best Essay by the Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures; an afterword for an edited collection of the writings of Ora Eddleman Reed with University of Nebraska Press (2024); an essay on Cherokee literary nationalism and historiography for Transmotion journal; and ongoing research on Cherokee history, story, modernity, and kinship refracted through family archives and stories.
At the University of Oregon, Kirby has also participated in a number of programming intiiatives as co-organizer of two conferences, "Alternative Sovereignties: Decolonization Through Indigenous Vision and Struggle" and "Engaged Humanities: Partnerships between Academia and Tribal Communities," and co-curator of a UO Libraries exhibit on the Sac and Fox Olypian and athlete Jim Thorpe. He is also a faculty co-director for the Native American and Indigenous Studies Academic Residential Community, an advisor for the UO/Otago Indigenous Cultural Exchange program, and a founding member of the UO Native Strategies Group. Additionally, Kirby serves on faculty advisory boards for the Graduate School, the Provost’s Environment Initiative, the Oregon Humanities Center, the Center for the Study of Women & Society, and the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art.
In 2010-11, Kirby served as a dissertation fellow for the Harry Ransom Center for the Humanities at the University of Texas at Austin and was named an American Council for Learned Societies dissertation fellow in 2011-12. In 2014-15, he was named an Oregon Humanities Center Faculty Fellow and was recognized with a Tykeson Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in 2016. In 2019, Brown was named as one of two inaugural speakers for the UO Authors Book Talk Series and was also recognized as one of two Norman H. Brown Faculty Fellows in research, teaching, and service in the College of Arts Sciences for 2019-21. In spring 2023, Kirby was awarded the Ersted Distinguished Teaching Award for Specialized Pedagogy (read his Ersted profile here) and was named David M. and Nancy L Petrone Faculty Scholar for 2023-2026.
Education
Statement
My primary research and teaching areas include Native American and Indigenous writing and cultural production from the late eighteenth century to the present, Indigenous critical theory, and studies in nationhood/nationalism, sovereignty/self-determination, modernism/modernity, and genre. More broadly, I am interested in the politics of race, nation, citizenship, and belonging in ethnic American writing and the relationships between narrative form, cultural representation, public policy, and the law.
Research
My primary research interests include Native American and Indigenous writing and cultural production from the late eighteenth century to the present, Indigenous critical theory, settler colonialism and decolonization, and studies in nationhood/nationalism, sovereignty/self-determination, modernism/modernity, and genre. More broadly, I am interested in the politics of race, nation, citizenship, belonging, and futurity in Indigenous cultural production and the relationships between narrative form, cultural representation, public policy, law, and lived experience.
My book, Stoking the Fire: Nationhood in Cherokee Writing, 1907-1970 (University of Oklahoma Press, 2018), examines how four Cherokee writers variously remembered, imagined and enacted Cherokee nationhood in the period between Oklahoma statehood in 1907 and tribal reorganization in the early 1970s. It was awarded an Andrew W. Mellon grant in 2018, earned the Thomas J. Lyons Award for best monograph in Western American Literary Studies by the Western Literature Association in 2019, and received Honorable Mention for Studies in Native American Literatures, Cultures, and Languages by the Modern Language Association in 2020.
I am also co-editor, along with Stephen Ross and Alana Sayers, of two projects: Print-Plus cluster of six essays on "Indigenous Modernities" for Modernism/modernity journal, and the Routledge Handbook to North American Indigenous Modernisms (Routledge Press, 2022), which was awarded Best Edition, Anthology, or Essay Collection by the Modernist Studies Association in 2023.
More recent work includes an essay on the politics of form in the short fiction of Ruth Muskrat Bronson for the Routledge Companion to Gender and the American West, which was awarded the Beatrice Medicine Award for Best Essay by the Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures (2024); an afterword for The Selected Works of Ora Eddleman Reed with University of Nebraska Press (2024); an essay on Cherokee literary nationalism and historiography for Transmotion journal; and ongoing research on Cherokee history, story, modernity, and kinship refracted through family archives and stories.
Honors and Awards
- Beatrice Medicine Award for Outstanding Essay, Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures, 2024.
- David M. and Nancy L. Petrone Faculty Scholar, University of Oregon, 2023-2026.
- Provost’s Teaching Academy Inductee. University of Oregon, Fall 2023.
- Best Edition, Anthology, or Essay Collection, Modernist Studies Association, 2023.
- Ersted Distinguised Teaching Award for Specialized Pedagogy, College of Arts and Sciences, University of Oregon 2023.
- I3 Research Award, "“Center for Indigenous Data Sovereignty.” Co-Investigator with Jennifer O’Neal (IRES) and Ashley Cordes (ENVS). University of Oregon. Spring 2023.
- I3 Research Award, “Indigenous-led framework for collaboration across knowledge and value systems for the conservation of bio-cultural diversity – the Totem Pole Journey as communication method.” Co-investigator with Barbara Muraca (Philosophy), Marsha Weisiger (History), Kari Norgaard (Sociology), and Briana Meier (Environmental Studies & Policy). University of Oregon. Spring 2021.
- MLA Prize for Studies in Native American Literatures, Cultures, and Languages for Stoking the Fire: Nationhood in Cherokee Writing, 1906-1970. 2020. Honorable Mention.
- Town and Gown Sustainability Award for "Engaged Humanities: Parternships Between Academic and Tribal Communities," UO Office of Sustainability, 2020.
- Thomas J. Lyon Award for Oustanding Book in Western American Literary and Cultural Studies for Stoking the Fire: Nationhood in Cherokee Writing, 1906-1970, Western Literature Association, 2019.
- Norman H. Brown Faculty Fellow, College of Arts and Sciences, University of Oregon, 2019-21.
- UO Authors Books Series Selection, University of Oregon, 2019-20.
- Lansdowne Visiting Speaker, University of Victoria, BC, February 2019.
- Andrew W. Mellon Recovering Languages and Literacies of the Americas Grant for Stoking the Fire: Nationhood in Cherokee Writing, 1907-1970, Summer 2017.
- Tykeson Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, College of Arts and Sciences, University of Oregon, Winter 2016.
- Oregon Humanities Center Faculty Fellow, University of Oregon, 2015-16.
- Don D. Walker Prize for Best Published Essay, Western Literature Association, 2012.
- Andrew W. Mellon Foundation/ACLS Dissertation Fellowship, 2011-12.
- Harry Ransom Center for the Humanities Dissertation Fellowship, University of Texas at Austin, 2010-11.
- George H. Mitchell Award for Outstanding Graduate Research, Graduate School, University of Texas at Austin, 2010.
Teaching
Statement of Teaching Philosophy
Approaching education and knowledge production as civic responsibilities, I invite my students to engage the same critical issues in the classroom that I explore in my research. Consequently, my courses turn on themes of Indigeneity, settler colonialism, race, and decolonization; culture, identity, and belonging; the ethics of representation and power; and the multiple ways Indigenous and ethnic American writers have variously revised, contested, and imagined alternatives to dominant narratives across history. By authorizing a wide range of voices and experiences in the classroom, I challenge students to critically embrace the unfamiliar and uncomfortable, to productively unsettle their own relationships to the status quo, to consider how positionality facilitates or restricts access to the structures of social power and privilege, and to collectively imagine decolonized and liberationist futures. Doing so exposes us to that unstable yet enormously creative space where knowledge is built rather than possessed; where self, community, and relationality are always in the process of being formed, contested, and remade; and where genuine social transformation becomes possible. Ultimately, I'm invested in how literature and cultural production shows us how to be responsible descendants to those who have come before and productive future ancestors for those who come after.
Courses
- ENG 244: Introduction to Native American Literatures
- ENG 245: Introduction to Ethnic American Literatures
- ENG 365: Race, Nation, and Modernist Form in the Ethnic American Bildungsroman
- ENG 361: Native American Writers (Novel)
- ENG 361: Native American Writers (Nationhood, Sovereignty, Story, and Place)
- ENG 361: Native American Writers (Contemporary Indigenous Women's Writing)
- ENG 488/588: Native American Literature and Film (Race and Film)
- ENG 488/588: Contemporary Indigenous Cinema
- ENG 660: Race, Nation, and the Politics of Belonging in the Ethnic American Bildungsroman
- ENG 660: Native American Writing from Allotment to the Renaissance, 1887-1968
- ENG 660: Native American Modernisms
- ENG 600: Contemporary Indigenous Literature and Theory