Alyssa Hunziker

Alyssa Hunziker is a specialist in Native American and Indigenous literature and U.S. empire studies. Her book project, Histories in Common: Indigenous Literatures and the Extra Archives of U.S. Empire, studies moments of historical convergence between global Indigenous communities in literature—from Native North America to the Philippines, Guam, the Marshall Islands, and Viet Nam—connecting the U.S.’s occupation of the continent to its Pacific empire.  Histories in Common argues that U.S. empire inadvertently created possibilities for alliance and exchange across differently colonized Indigenous nations, and that contemporary Native American and Indigenous authors unravel such connections to other Indigenous communities in the wake of empire.

Hunziker teaches courses in Native American literature, Indigenous studies, multi-ethnic American literature, and settler colonial studies. She serves on the editorial board of Studies in American Indian Literatures and is the former book review editor of American Indian Quarterly. With Mitch R. Murray she is the co-editor of a double special issue of College Literature, “Genres of Empire” (2023). Her research appears in American Periodicals, American Quarterly, Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States, and Settler Colonial Studies.

For a complete CV please click here

Teaching and Research Interests

Native American and Indigenous Literatures
Transnational American Studies
Settler colonial studies
Contemporary Literature

Recent Publications

• Double Special Issue: “Genres of Empire,” College Literature (co-edited with Mitch R. Murray), Volume 50, Number 2-3. Spring-Summer 2023.
• “‘Battlefield and Classroom’: Indigenous Student-Soldiers and U.S. Imperialism in the Carlisle Indian School Press,” special issue “Indigenous Periodicals,” American Periodicals, Volume 33, Number 2, Fall 2023.
• “Chinese Exclusion, Indigeneity, and Settler Colonial Refusal in C Pam Zhang’s How Much of These Hills is Gold,” MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States, Volume 47, Issue 4, Winter 2022.
• “Playing Indian, Playing Filipino: Native American and Filipino Exchange at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School,” American Quarterly, Volume 72, Issue 2. June 2020.
• “At the Intersections of Empire: Ceremony, Transnationalism, and American Indian-Filipino Exchange,” Studies in American Indian Literatures, Volume 31, Number 3-4. Fall 2019-Winter 2020.
• “Toni Morrison, Indigeneity, and Settler Colonialism,” Settler Colonial Studies, Volume 8, Issue 4.

Recent Honors and Awards

• National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend, 2024
• 1921 Prize in American Literature, American Literature Society, 2024
• Honorable Mention, Don D. Walker Prize, Western American Literature Association, 2023
• NEH Summer Institute, “Towards a People’s History of Landscape: Black and Indigenous Histories of the Nation’s Capital,” 2022
• Honorable Mention, Constance M. Rourke Prize, American Studies Association, 2021
• First Book Institute, Center for American Literary Studies, 2021

For a detailed academic bio, please see Professor Hunziker’s department profile.