Jesse L. Rosenberger Work-in-Progress Seminar Series:

"Indigenous Identity Schemes in the Chicano Movement and Red Power"

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About the speaker:

Jedediah Kuhn

Assistant Professor of History

PhD, Indiana University , 2018

Professor Kuhn is an interdisciplinary historian of race, indigeneity, gender, and sexuality with a focus on Native American and Chicanx history in the American West and U.S.-Mexico Borderlands.

Kuhn is currently working on a book titled Traces of Intimacy: Native Americans and Mexican Americans in the Sierra Borderlands that provides a relational examination of Native American and Mexican American racialization in 19th and 20th century California and Nevada. Rather than focus on the history of one group or the other, this book asks what we might learn if we examine moments of connection between these groups, moments that include both connections in literature and other forms of cultural expression as well as the everyday reality of Native Americans and Mexican Americans living side-by-side as friends, neighbors, lovers, and rivals. It reveals that members of both groups have had to continually negotiate their perceived racial relationship to the other in order to gain political rights and hold onto land and other resources. Ultimately, it tells a new story about how both groups have had to navigate larger structures of race to carve out livable lives.

Kuhn likes to take an interdisciplinary approach to history in both my research and teaching by using literature, film, music, and popular culture as historical documents that reveal aspects of American cultural thought. His areas of interest include Native American and Indigenous history; Mexican American, Chicanx, and Latinx history; American studies; LGBTQ history; women of color feminisms and queer of color critique; and critical race and ethnic studies.