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 the environment, resource politics, treaties and AI & Data Ethics whose current role is research-led. From September 2019-March 2023 she is a Leverhulme Major Research Fellow working on a new book on the environmental record of President Nixon and the Republican Party. She is also 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)".
She is PI Host for British Academy Global Professor Gregory Smithers, 2020-2024, working on "Native Ecologies: Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Climate Change". See the project digital output produced with the University of Sheffield here: https://www.dhi.ac.uk/projects/cherokee-riverkeepers/ and here: https://www.cherokeeriverkeepers.org/. Professor Porter is also Co-Investigator within the Leverhulme Doctoral Centre for Water Cultures. (1.3M) and convenes its “Living With/Out Water” research theme.
Professor Porter serves on the UKRI Interdisciplinary Assessment Panel (2023-2025), AHRC Strategic Review College, 2016-2024, reviews and interviews on an ongoing basis for for the Fulbright Commission, and reviews for the 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 2023).
2. Trauma, Primitivism and the First World War: The Making of Frank Prewett (Bloomsbury Press), 6 May 2021.
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 collaborates with Dina Gilio-Whitaker (Colville Confederated Tribes), California State University and Dr Clint Carroll (Cherokee), University of Colorado as a Lead Editor of the Cambridge University Press book series, Elements in Indigenous Environmental Research. To contribute to this series 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.
Her next speaking event is at the invited workshop 'Resilience & Reconstruction', Centre for Culture & the Mind, University of Copenhagan, 30 Nov. -1Dec. 2023 where she will speak on 'Post-Traumatic Futures: Ecology and Technological Change". Other recent engagements included the opening keynote at the 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, the 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 a UCL Institute for Global Prosperity Director's Seminar entitled "Indigenous Environmental History and the Future of Prosperity" on 10 March 2022 (https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/igp/events/2022/mar/indigenous-environmental-history-and-its-relevance-future-prosperity). Other recent 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 a range of doctoral candidates working on Indigenous Environmental History; US & Canadian Environmental Studies; Heritage Decolonisation & Indigenous Data Curation.
Professor Porter undertakes a range of KE work on indigenisation/decolonisation, working with business schools, textbook publishers and exam boards.
Professor Porter contributes regularly to the media. She has appeared on BBC TV News, BBC Radio, BBC Radio Bristol, TalkTV, and writes for the TLS, History Today, BBC Magazine, The Conversation and The Spectator. For more, please see https://treatiedspaces.com/knowledge-exchange/