Assistant Professor

Alyssa Hunziker is a specialist in Native American and Indigenous literature and U.S. empire studies. Her first book, Histories in Common: Native American Literatures, Extra Archives, and the Indigenous Transpacific (UNC Press 2026), studies moments of historical convergence between global Indigenous communities in literature—from Native America to the Philippines, Guam, the Marshall Islands, and Vietnam—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’s next book project, Empire’s Entanglements: The Carlisle Indian Industrial School and U.S. Colonialism in the Philippines and Puerto Rico, traces the Carlisle Indian Industrial School’s ties to U.S. colonial projects in the Pacific and the Caribbean. Using personal scrapbooks, correspondence, diaries, memoirs, and school periodicals, Empire’s Entanglements argues that Carlisle was not only a pedagogical model for overseas colonial schools but was itself a hub for teachers and students moving across schools for Native Americans, Filipinos, and Puerto Ricans. She argues that the U.S.’s ever-expanding educational empire left space for Native American students to engage with new U.S. imperial subjects, both overseas and at home, leading to new networks of kinship, solidarity, and at times, antagonism.

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, Settler Colonial Studies, and Indigenous Media Ecologies.

For a complete CV please click here

Teaching and Research Interests

Native American and Indigenous Literatures
Transnational American Studies
Settler colonial studies
Contemporary Literature
Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the US

Recent Publications

  • Histories in Common: Native American Literatures, Extra Archives, and the Indigenous Transpacific, University of North Carolina Press, 2026.
  • “Visual Sovereignty and Trans-Indigenous Collaboration in Poem-Films from North America to the Pacific Islands,” Indigenous Media Ecologies eds. Jill Doerfler, Oliver Scheiding, Cristina Stanciu, University of Nebraska Press, Fall 2026 (forthcoming).
  • 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

 

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