Assistant Director of the Center for Indigenous Politics & Policy and Adjunct Professor in the College of Professional Studies at George Washington University
About
Elizabeth Rule, an enrolled member of the Chickasaw Nation, is the assistant director of the Center for Indigenous Politics and Policy and an adjunct professor in the College of Professional Studies at the George Washington University. She is currently a PhD candidate in Brown University's American Studies Department. Elizabeth received her MA from Brown University and her BA from Yale University, both in American studies. Before coming to George Washington, she was a visiting scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the Department of Anthropology. She is a recipient of a number of research fellowships and grants, including: the Ford Foundation Dissertation Completion Fellowship, "Holisso: The Center for Study of Chickasaw History and Culture Fellowship," the Mellon Mays Predoctoral Research Development Grant, and the Chancellor Thomas A. Tisch Fellowship for Graduate Studies. Elizabeth has lectured, presented, and taught courses related to Native American studies nationally and internationally, placing particular emphasis on Indian law.
Current Work:
In her dissertation, "Reproducing Resistance: Gendered Violence and Indigenous Nationhood," Rule tells the story of the extraordinary violence indigenous women confront across the US-Canada border. This violence takes many forms — in the immediate physical sense as rape and murder, and in the structural sense, through state-sanctioned policies advancing sterilization and disenfranchisement. However it manifests, this violence challenges the sovereignty of Native nations. Drawing on law, policy, science and technology, and expressive culture, Rule explores this borderlands violence, its various manifestations in the social and political lives of indigenous women, and its troubling disruptions of territory and nation. Taken as a whole, this project illuminates how Indigenous women's bodies are marked by struggle, are objectified and policed by the state, and how they serve, finally, as embodied sites of resistance.
Research Area Keyword(s):
Native American and Indigenous studies; women's and gender studies; Native American law and policy
