Professor

Philip J. Deloria

Harvard University
Historian; Academic administrator; Educator
Area
Humanities and Arts
Specialty
History
Elected
2015

Philip J. Deloria is the Leverett Saltonstall Professor of History at Harvard University, where his research and teaching focus on the social, cultural and political histories of the relations among American Indian peoples and the United States, as well as the comparative and connective histories of indigenous peoples in a global context. He is the author of several books, including Playing Indian (Yale University Press, 1998), Indians in Unexpected Places (University Press of Kansas, 2004), American Studies: A User’s Guide (University of California Press, 2017), with Alexander Olson, and Becoming Mary Sully: Toward an American Indian Abstract (University of Washington Press, 2019), as well as two co-edited books and numerous articles and chapters. Previously, he taught for six years at the University of Colorado, and then at the University of Michigan from 2001 to 2017, before joining the faculty at Harvard in January 2018, where he served as Chair of the Committee on Degrees in History and Literature. At Michigan, he served as the Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education, Director of the Program in American Culture, and of the Native American Studies Program, and held the Carroll Smith-Rosenberg Collegiate Chair. Deloria served four terms as a trustee of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian, where he chaired the Repatriation Committee. He is former president of the American Studies Association, the Organization of American Historians, and the Society for American History, and an elected member of the American Philosophical Society and the American Antiquarian Society. He was elected to the American Academy in 2015 and chairs the Class IV, Section 2 (History) Section Panel.

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