The Department of Ethnic Studies UC Berkeley

Bio & Research Interests

Shari M. Huhndorf received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from New York University, and she is currently Class of 1938 Professor of Native American Studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. Her research and teaching focus on the areas of interdisciplinary Native American studies, Alaska Native studies, contemporary literary and visual culture, cultural studies, gender studies, and American studies.

Professor Huhndorf is the author of three books, including Native Lands: Culture, Gender, and Indigenous Territorial Claims (forthcoming, University of California Press). Her previous books include Going Native: Indians in the American Cultural Imagination (Cornell University Press, 2001) and Mapping the Americas: The Transnational Politics of Contemporary Native Culture (Cornell University Press, 2009), along with the co-edited volume Indigenous Women and Feminism: Politics, Activism, Culture (University of British Columbia Press, 2010), winner of the Canadian Women’s Studies Association prize for Outstanding Scholarship.  Another co-edited work, Sovereignty, Indigeneity, and the Law (Duke University Press, 2011), a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly, won the Council of Editors of Learned Journals award for best special issue of a journal as well as the award for outstanding indigenous scholarship from the American Indian and Alaska Native Professors Association for 2011. Her work has also appeared in journals including Critical Inquiry, Signs, PMLA, American Quarterly, American Anthropologist, South Atlantic Quarterly, Social Identities, and Annals of Scholarship. She has received major fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the American Association of University Women. Currently she is working (with Roy Huhndorf) on a Native community history of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, the largest Indigenous land claims settlement in US history.

Professor Huhndorf is a member of the Board of Trustees of the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, where she serves as chair of the repatriation committee. She is a former member and chair of the executive committee of the Division of Twentieth-Century American Literature of the Modern Language Association. She also served for a decade on the board of directors of the CIRI Foundation, which provides educational funding and supports cultural programs for Alaska Natives in her home community. At Berkeley, Professor Huhndorf is affiliated with the Center for Race and Gender, the Interdisciplinary Program in American Studies, the Designated Emphasis in Gender and Women’s Studies, the Joseph A. Myers Center for Research on Native American Issues, the Canadian Studies Program, and the Joint Medical Program MD/MS.  She received a President’s Award from the Alaska Federation of Natives for her contributions to Native education as well as a Distinguished Teaching Award from the Division of Social Sciences and a Distinguished Faculty Mentor Award from the Graduate Assembly at UC Berkeley. Huhndorf is Yup’ik and was raised in her home community in Alaska.

Courses Taught

Introduction to Native American Studies

Displaying Race, Displaying Culture: Exhibitions, Film, Photography

Native American Literature, Culture, and Politics

Contemporary Issues in Native America

Indigenous Culture and the Politics of Space

Race and Visuality

Cultural Texts: Contemporary Theories and Methods

Books