Jodi Byrd (Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma)
Assistant Professor, American Indian Studies and English

Office: Native American House
Phone: (217) 265-9870
E-mail: jabyrd@uiuc.edu

Jodi Byrd is an assistant professor of American Indian Studies and English and specializes in American Indian and Pacific Literatures, Postcolonial Theory, Indigenous Critical Theory and Politics, Pop Culture, and Representations of Indigenous Peoples.

Her publications include "(Post)Colonial Plainsongs: Toward Native Literary Worldings" in Unlearning the Language of Conquest edited by Don Trent Jacobs, University of Texas Press, 2006, and "Living My Native Life Deadly:  Red Lake, Ward Churchill, and the Politics of Competing Genocides" appeared in American Indian Quarterly (Volume 27, Number 2, Spring 2007, p. 310-332).

Professor Byrd is currently working on book project entitled Colonial Cacophonies, Decolonial Worlds:  Toward an Indigenous Postcolonial Theory. This project examines how settler colonialisms function in landscapes that bear multiple and competing experiences of arrival, slavery, removal, and resistance.  Her other research projects include co-editing a 2007 volume of Alternatives that looks at the intersection between Indigenous Politics and Law, an article that examines the discursive strategies used in debates to frame and resist the incorporation of Native Hawaiian governance within U.S. federal Indian law, and an article examining how race, colonialism, space, and indigeneity interact within postmodern literatures of horror.

Professor Byrd teaches American Indian Studies, Postcolonial Theory, American Indian and Indigenous Literatures