About
Areas of research: Native American history, Nineteenth century history, and settler colonial studies
I study how government officials, land speculators, and missionaries constructed western expansion in New York through debates over Seneca lands. The Senecas, one of the Iroquois Six Nations, resisted this construction as settler claims became so entangled that dispossession was delayed, complicated, and avoided altogether. The continued presence of large Seneca reservations and separate political communities interrupted the Empire State’s physical and metaphorical landscape during the nineteenth century.
Chair: Dr. Maeve Kane