Jodi Byrd


Jodi Ann Byrd is an American indigenous academic. She is an associate professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she also holds an affiliation with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. In the domain of additional campus affiliations, she is also the associate professor of Gender and Women's Studies, National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, Global Studies Programs and Courses. Her research applies critical theory to indigenous studies and governance, science and technology studies, game studies, indigenous feminism and indigenous sexualities. She also possesses research interests in American Indian Studies, Post-Colonial Studies, Digital Media, Theory & Criticism.

Personal

Byrd is the daughter of physician John Byron Byrd and the great-grandniece of William L. Byrd, who served as governor of the Chickasaw Nation from 1888-1890 and 1890-1892.
She is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation.

Education, career, and service

Byrd holds a master's degree and Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Iowa. Her dissertation was Colonialism's Cacophony: Natives and Arrivants at the Limits of Postcolonial Theory. Before working at the University of Illinois, she was an assistant professor of indigenous politics
in the department of political science of the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
She was formerly associated with the American Indian Studies Program at Illinois. In the wake of the Illinois administration's failure to hire Steven Salaita into the program, which she had championed as acting director of the program, she considered offers to move to three other universities. However, the University of Illinois persuaded her to stay and provided her an alternative position in the English and Gender and Women's Studies departments.
She is the co-editor of the Critical Insurgencies series for Northwestern University Press.
She was president of the Association for the Study of American Indian Literatures for 2011–2012.
In 2012, she was adopted as a Clan Sister of the Native American Literature Symposium, which she has stated has been an inspiring community for her since her first days as a graduate student. Byrd has also served as an editorial board member for the journal Critical Ethnic Studies.

Awards and recognition

Byrd's 2011 book The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism won the 2011 Best First Book of the Year award from the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, and the 2012 Wordcraft Circle Award for Academic Work of the Year. Earlier, Byrd won the 2008 Beatrice Medicine Award for Scholarship in American Indian Studies of the Native American Literature Symposium for her paper "Living my native life deadly: Red Lake, Ward Churchill, and the discourses of competing genocides".

Books

2018