Summary
Professor Porter is Principal Investigator of the Treatied Spaces Research Group ( https://treatiedspaces.com/about-us/). She is an interdisciplinary researcher of Indigenous historical themes in relation to treaties, the environment, resource politics, IP, AI & Data Ethics whose role is research-led. She is currently working on two new contracted books, one entitled 'Canada's Green Challenge' (McGill, 2025) and 'What Would Nixon Do?: Environmental Lessons from the Nixon Presidency' (University of Nebraska, 2026), based on research completed as a Leverhulme Major Research Fellow (2019-2023).
She is PI of the 3-year AHRC Standard Research Grant, "Brightening the Covenant Chain: Revealing Cultures of Diplomacy between the Crown and the Iroquois Confederacy" (931.032k, 2021-2024)". Professor Porter is also a Co-Investigator within the Leverhulme Doctoral Centre for Water Cultures. (1.3M) and convenes its “Living With/Out Water” research theme.
She is PI Host for Leverhulme Visiting Professor Canada Research Chair Dr Damien Lee across 2024-25; and PI Host for British Academy Global Professor Gregory Smithers, 2020-2024, working on the project "Native Ecologies: Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Climate Change". See the project's digital outputs produced with the University of Sheffield here: https://www.dhi.ac.uk/projects/cherokee-riverkeepers/ and here: https://www.cherokeeriverkeepers.org/.
Professor Porter serves on the UKRI Interdisciplinary Assessment Panel (2023-2025), AHRC Strategic Review College, 2016-, reviews and interviews for the Fulbright Commission, Leverhulme Trust, NERC, Finnish Research Council and Higher Education Academy. She is External Examiner for BA History, University of Bristol, 2021-2024 and for the University of Bristol's Sustainability Summer School.
She served as UK REF 2021-2022 full Panel Member (History) and was a sub-panel Interdisciplinary Advisor across all three stages of the REF process. She also serves on the Advisory Board of History Today (2023-) and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
Her research monographs include:
1. Canada's Green Challenge (Queen's-McGill University Press, forthcoming 2025).
2. Trauma, Primitivism and the First World War: The Making of Frank Prewett (Bloomsbury Press), 6 May 2021. *2023/4 UK Nomination for the International Council for Canadian Studies Pierre Savard Award for outstanding scholarly monographs on a Canadian topic.
3. Native American Environmentalism (University of Nebraska Press, 2014, pbk 2018),
4. Native American Indian Freemasonry: Associationalism & Performance in America, (University of Nebraska Press, 2011, pbk 2019)
5. To Be Indian: The Life of Seneca-Iroquois Arthur Caswell Parker, (University of Oklahoma Press, 2023, paperback, 2001, hardback).
Professor Porter received the Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers
Writer of the Year Award for The Cambridge Companion to Native American Literature, Cambridge University Press in 2006 and the American Library Association’s Choice Magazine's Outstanding Academic Title Award for To Be Indian: The Life of Iroquois-Seneca Arthur Caswell Parker, Foreword W. N. Fenton, The University of Oklahoma Press in 2002.
Professor Porter is Lead Editor of the Cambridge University Press book series, Elements in Indigenous Environmental Research, in collaboration with fellow Lead Editors Dina Gilio-Whitaker (Colville Confederated Tribes), California State University, and Dr Clint Carroll (Cherokee), University of Colorado, alongside Associate Editor Matthias Wong (University of Singapore). To contribute to this series, please see here: https://www.cambridge.org/core/what-we-publish/elements/elements-in-indigenous-environmental-research.
Professor Porter's work has benefited from awards from the Fulbright Commission (All-Disciplines Scholar Award, Dartmouth, 2016), British Academy, AHRC, Canadian Government and Leverhulme Trust.
Recent speaking events include at the invited workshop 'Resilience & Reconstruction', Centre for Culture & the Mind, University of Copenhagan, 30 Nov. -1Dec. 2023 where she spoke on 'Post-Traumatic Futures: Ecology and Technological Change"; the opening keynote at OU-Oxford-Cambridge DTP Conference, Sept, 2023; participation in the April 2023 symposium at Harvard Law School on 'Stewardship, Communitarianism and (Intellectual) Property: The Philosophical Foundations of Traditional Knowledge Protection" hosted by Professor Ruth Okediji, Director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society; Plenary address at the Irish Association for American Studies Annual Conference on 29 April 2022 hosted by Dublin City University ( https://iaas.ie/iaas-annual-conference-2022/) and the UCL Institute for Global Prosperity Director's Seminar, entitled "Indigenous Environmental History and the Future of Prosperity", 2022 (https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/igp/events/2022/mar/indigenous-environmental-history-and-its-relevance-future-prosperity). Further keynotes include the 2021 Mayflower Lecture “Indigenous Food Sovereignty: The Political Ecological Legacies of the Mayflower Sailing", University of Plymouth; 2019 Swiss Association for North American Studies Keynote, "Decolonising Water"; the 2019 Eccles British Association of Canadian Studies BACS Keynote "Who Fights for Canada as the Climate Changes?"; and 2019 Alymer Lecture, University of York.
Professor Porter gained her PhD (1994) and MA (1992) from the University of Nottingham . She was awarded a National Teaching Fellowship Award by AdvanceHE in 2018 and is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. She supervises doctoral candidates working on Indigenous Environmental History; US & Canadian Environmental Studies; Heritage Decolonisation & Indigenous Data Curation.
Professor Porter also undertakes a range of KE, Impact and consultancy work on Indigenisation/decolonisation issues, working with business schools, textbook publishers, exam boards and government bodies. Recent events she collaborated on include 2 artist's residencies, a major Indigenous exhibition at the American Museum & Gardens, Bath, a symposium, and a workshop plenary. With DR C. Prior, she is co-producing the Kinetic Map 'Movement and Commons Worlds' (launch June 2024); the 'Voices at the Wood's Edge' series of Mohawk Diplomatic Soundscapes, and the 'Mapscapes 'Zooniverse project. For more, please see:https://treatiedspaces.com/kinetic-map/
Professor Porter contributes regularly to the media, including BBC TV News, BBC Radio, BBC Radio Bristol, TalkTV, and Monocle Radio. She has written for the TLS, History Today, BBC Magazine, The Conversation and The Spectator. She is a member of the History Today Advisory Board. For more, please see https://treatiedspaces.com/knowledge-exchange/