Summary
I grew up on traditional Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee lands near Kingston, Ontario Canada, and taught at Queen’s University (Canada), the University of Toronto, and the University of Cambridge, where I held a postdoctoral fellowship from 2004 to 2006. I am a life member of Wolfson College, Cambridge and held visiting appointments in Canada, the United States and in the UK. My work has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the British Academy, and the Leverhulme Trust, and the Arts and Humanities Research Council of the United Kingdom.
With my colleague Joy Porter, I lead the Treatied Spaces Research Group. Our aim is to deepen understanding of treaties as living and contested instruments of inter-cultural diplomacy. Historic and contemporary treaties remain central to the quest for social and environmental justice across the globe and are a foundation for renewed and more balanced relationships between Indigenous and settler communities. They shape our understanding of sovereignty over land, resources, peoples and environments on earth, in the seas and in space.
My initial research interests focussed on the sovereignty and the intersection of church and state in early modern Britain, a theme that I examined in depth in my first two books and in a range of journal articles published between 2003 and 2014. In 2015, during a sabbatical term at Dartmouth College, I radically shifted my focus to diplomacy between Native nations and the British Crown, which positioned treaties as instances of cross-cultural negotiations about sovereignty. This early work was supported by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship, which allowed me to complete Settlers in Indian Country: Sovereignty and Indigenous Power in Early America (Cambridge University Press, 2020). It foregrounds Indigenous conceptions of sovereignty and power to refine the place of settler colonialism in American colonial and early republican history. My fourth book, which is now complete, is Treaty Ground: Diplomacy and the Politics of Sovereignty in the American Northeast. Placing the Covenant Chain at its centre, the book argues that treaties defined a rules-based system of interaction in the international locales of Northeastern North America. Research for this project formed part of my work package for 'Brightening the Covenant Chain', a large AHRC Standard Research Grant for which I also produced an immersive digital map animation and a collection of soundscape recordings of Haundenosaunee diplomatic speech.
My next project, supported by a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship (2024-2027), is 'Treatied States of America'. This uses the concept of 'interior diplomacy' to position historic treaties in a set of contemporary contexts framed by Federal Indian Law in the US. I am also working on Back to Ka-ou-enesegoan, a project about movement, memory and the layered histories that connect one island to multiple international locales. An essay that frames this project was published in The Queen's Quarterly , 130 n. 3 (Fall 2023).