Allyson LaForge

Dr. Allyson LaForge is the third Abbott Lowell Cummings Postdoctoral Fellow in American Material Culture at Boston University, beginning in fall 2025. She will serve in this capacity with the American Studies Program through 2027.

She is 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. Her book project building on her dissertation research uses community-engaged methods and examines the role of Indigenous women as leaders and knowledge-keepers who employed and stewarded material culture to hold their communities together and maintain their homelands in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

At Boston University, she will teach courses on material culture, Indigenous history, and public humanities. This upcoming fall, her course “Materializing Indigenous History” will trace histories of Native American material culture as tools of communication, expressive culture, and resistance and interrogate the creation, collection, and preservation of these objects across Turtle Island. She has previously been an instructor of courses at Brown University in American studies and public humanities.

Dr. LaForge’s writing and research has appeared in several books as well as Commonplace: the journal of early American life and Oxford Bibliographies in Anthropology. She has curated several exhibits, including Restor(y)ing Indigenous Collections at Mystic Seaport Museum and Converging Cultures: Native America and the Early Tourist Market at the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum.

Her other public-facing work includes a 2019 digital exhibit at the John Carter Brown Library that connected early cartographic collections with Indigenous environmental knowledge of the Northeast and a co-authored ethnographic overview of the Blackstone River Valley National Historic Park for the National Park Service. She has also collaborated with the Tomaquag Museum, Andrew J. Blackbird Museum, and Worcester Historical Museum on projects that support community-engaged stewardship and interpretation of Indigenous history.

Dr. LaForge holds a PhD in American Studies and MA in Public Humanities from Brown University and a BA in History and French from Mount Holyoke College. She completed her MA practicum at the Abbe Museum in Bar Harbor, ME.