Faculty | Native American and Indigenous Studies

Core Faculty

Joseph M. Pierce, Director

Joseph Pierce Joseph M. Pierce is Associate Professor in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature and the Inaugural Director of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative. He is the author of Argentine Intimacies: Queer Kinship in an Age of Splendor, 1890-1910 (SUNY Press, 2019) and Speculative Relations: Indigenous Worlding and Repair (Duke UP, 2025), co-editor of Políticas del amor: Derechos sexuales y escrituras disidentes en el Cono Sur (Cuarto Propio, 2018) as well as the 2021 special issue of GLQ, “Queer/Cuir Américas: Translation, Decoloniality, and the Incommensurable.” His work has been published in Revista Hispánica Moderna, Critical Ethnic Studies, Latin American Research Review, among other venues. Along with S.J. Norman (Wiradjuri), he is co-curator of the performance series Knowledge of Wounds. He is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation.

David Heska Wanbli Weiden (Sicangu Lakota Nation), Professor, Department of English

David Heska Wanbli Weiden, an enrolled citizen of the Sicangu Lakota Nation, is the author of Winter Counts (Ecco/HarperCollins), nominated for an Edgar Award, and winner of the Anthony, Thriller, Lefty, Barry, Macavity, Electa Quinney Award for Native Literature, and other awards. The novel was a New York Times Editors’ Choice, Indie Next pick, main selection of the Book of the Month Club, and named by Time magazine as one of the 100 best mystery and thriller novels of all time. The sequel,Wisdom Corner, is forthcoming. He has short stories appearing in the anthologies Best American Mystery and Suspense Stories, Never Whistle at Night, Crimes Against Nature, and others. His scholarship and nonfiction appear in the New York Times, Shenandoah, and other journals. He’s the editor of the anthology Native Noir, forthcoming from Akashic Books, and is the editor of Native Edge, a new series of the University of New Mexico Press. In 2024, he was Indigenous Artist in Residence at Brown University and has received fellowships from PEN America, MacDowell, Ucross, Ragdale, Vermont Studio Center, Sewanee, and Tin House. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin, his law degree from the University of Denver, and his MFA degree from the Institute of American Indian Arts.

Darcey Evans (Karuk), Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology

Darcey Evans Darcey is a cultural anthropologist who broadly focuses on the politics of environmental justice, settler colonialism, and Indigenous sovereignty in North America. Her current research positions salmon aquaculture in British Columbia, Canada as a place from which to explore how Indigenous and state sovereignties are enacted in water-centered and maritime regions. She questions the forms that “blue futures” might take by investigating how efforts to grow ocean-based economies are advanced by institutions, impact coastal communities, and intersect with Indigenous movements to reclaim coastal seascapes. She is also interested in the politics and processes of environmental conservation, renewable energy transitions, food movements, and multispecies relations. Darcey has worked with Indigenous communities, nonprofit organizations, and federal agencies in California, Oregon, Washington State, and British Columbia. Combining social and environmental science methodologies, she has supported the ability for Indigenous nations to create climate research and adaptation programs, advocated for water policy and fisheries reform in California, and participated in salmon and forestry surveys and Indigenous-led environmental monitoring campaigns. Darcey also led the development of the Advocacy and Water Protection in Native California Curriculum and has worked with traditional knowledge-holders, school districts, and educators to integrate Native American Studies in K-12 schools in California. Darcey is of British-Karuk heritage and is a member of Quartz Valley Indian Reservation in Northern California. She will be joining the SBU faculty in the fall 2025 semester.

Affiliated Faculty

Andrew Newman, Professor, Department of English

Andrew has been teaching at Stony Brook since 2005. His first two books are at the intersection of early American, indigenous, and media studies. He is working on a third book, a cultural history of the teaching and learning of the most frequently-assigned books in American high schools. Relatedly, with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, he is co-directing a 2023 Summer Institute for Teachers, "Making the Good Reader and Citizen: A History of Literature Instruction at American Schools." He regularly teaches courses on all these topics.

For more information, including links to publications, please visit his profile on Humanities Commons.

Paul Kelton, Professor and Gardiner Chair in American History

Paul has examined the biological processes involved in the European takeover of the Americas in two books: Epidemics and Enslavement and Cherokee Medicine, Colonial Germs. By placing local struggles with epidemics within the large-scale context of colonialism's social disruption, structural violence, and political upheaval, his historical research has contemporary relevance to debates over global health disparities and emerging infectious diseases. He is continuing his research on Indigenous experiences with European-introduced diseases with multiple ongoing projects detailing the contours of Native death and survival during the Seven Years War in North America, the American Revolution, and Indian Removal.

Sebastián López-Vergara, Assistant Professor, Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature

Sebastián López Vergara is an IDEA Fellow in the Department of Hispanic Languages and Literature. He specializes in Latinx and Indigenous Diaspora Studies, and his research focuses on Indigenous representations across media and their relationships to histories of dispossession in modern Latin America with a particular focus on Chile. He completed his PhD at University of Washington, Seattle, where he taught cultural studies, critical ethnic studies, and Latin American studies courses, as well as Spanish language and contemporary Latin American history with University Beyond Bars, an organization offering post-secondary education to the incarcerated in Washington State’s prisons. Prior to Washington state, Vergara lived in Chile, where he was raised, and earned a BA in English Literature and Linguistics at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.