I am the 2025 – 2027 Abbott Lowell Cummings Postdoctoral Fellow in American Material Culture at Boston University. I received my PhD in American Studies from Brown University in 2025.
I am an interdisciplinary historian whose research is grounded in Native American and Indigenous studies, focusing on intersections with material culture studies, environmental and literary history, and public humanities.
My book project, Materializing Futurity: Networks of Native Women’s Resistance in the Northeast, uses community-engaged methods and examines how Indigenous women in the Native Northeast employed and stewarded material culture to hold their communities together and maintain their homelands across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
My public-facing work includes “Re-Mapping Patuxet: Wampanoag Place, Memory, and the Colonial Archive,” a collaborative digital humanities project; Restor(y)ing Indigenous Collections, an exhibit at Mystic Seaport Museum; and “An Investigation of Indigenous Presence in the Kittatuck (Blackstone River) Valley,” a co-authored ethnographic overview and assessment for the National Park Service. I have also completed collections inventories for the Andrew J. Blackbird Museum in Harbor Springs, MI and the Tomaquag Museum in Exeter, RI.
You can find my research published in Native American and Indigenous Studies and Commonplace: the journal of early American life.
Allyson LaForge 