Our Community

The founding Native American and Global Indigenous Studies (NAGIS) Working Group comprises University of Miami faculty and staff who research and teach across diverse fields of knowledge. This community is expanding over the course of Academic Year 2020-21 to incorporate faculty, staff, and students from across our institution.

• Raymond Orr

  Elizabeth B. White Endowed Professor in Political Science

  Email: rxo310@miami.edu

  College of Arts and Sciences

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  Dr. Raymond Orr is the Elizabeth B. White Endowed Chair and Professor of Political Science. Before joining UM, he was the Mae and John Hueston Distinguished Professor in Native American and Indigenous Studies and Associate Professor at Dartmouth College. his prior appointments include serving as the Department Chair of Native American Studies at the University of Oklahoma and teaching comparative and Indigenous politics at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Dr. Orr received my PhD in Political Science from UC Berkeley and have been a post-doctoral fellow at Princeton's Department of Politics, Yale's Program in Race, Ethnicity and Migration, and the University of Washington's Native Elder Research Center. He is currently a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Institute for Social Equity at The University of Melbourne.
  
  

• Traci Ardren

  Professor

  Email: tardren@miami.edu

  Department of Anthropology

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  Traci is an anthropological archaeologist interested in New World prehistoric cultures. Her research focuses on issues of identity and other forms of symbolic representation in the archaeological record, especially the ways in which differences are explained through gender. Current preoccupations include the role of cuisine in identity formation in the later periods of Classic Maya culture and prehistoric southern Florida, as well as the ways we can read memories in ancient living spaces. Traci directs the Matecumbe Chiefdom Project looking at the political organization and environmental adaptation of the pre-Hispanic occupants of the Florida Keys and is a staff member of the Proyecto de Interacción Política del Centro de Yucatán, at the Classic Maya site of Yaxuna, in Yucatan, Mexico where she is investigating the ways ancient road systems allowed for the flow of information and ideas and how culinary tourism and modern foodways intersect. As Consulting Curator for Mesoamerican Art, Traci has curated a number of exhibits at the Lowe Art Museum at the University of Miami, including “The Jaguar’s Spots: Ancient Mesoamerican Art from the Lowe Art Museum” in 2010, “Flowers for the Earth Lord: Guatemalan Textiles from the Permanent Collection” in 2006, and most recently, “Kay Pacha: Reciprocity with the Natural World in the Ancient Art of the Andes” in 2016. She grew up in and around the Ringling Museum of Art and the many ways in which objects are allowed to convey our wants and needs is a lifelong fascination.

• Denisse Córdova Montes

  Acting Associate Director, Human Rights Clinic

  Lecturer in Law

  Email: dcordova@law.miami.edu

  School of Law

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  Denisse Córdova Montes, J.D., M.P.H., is the Acting Associate Director and a Lecturer in Law with the Human Rights Clinic at the University of Miami School of Law. Prior to that, Denisse was based in Germany, where she coordinated the Gender and Women’s Rights Program at FIAN International, an international human rights organization that promotes and defends the rights to food and food sovereignty. At FIAN, she oversaw human rights fact-finding and advocacy in Africa, Asia, and Latin America around rural, peasant, and Indigenous women’s rights. She also supported social movements’ lobbying with the United Nations in Geneva, New York, and Rome in cases concerning access to land, water, adequate nutrition, decent working conditions, and against extractive and corporate actors. Denisse was also involved in global standard setting processes, particularly concerning rural and Indigenous women's rights.

  Denisse’s research focuses on food, food sovereignty, women’s rights, and human rights, and is particularly interested in social movements’ role in the advancement of human rights. Please click here to view some of her publications. Student projects she has supervised include a submission to the UN Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women focused the rights of Indigenous women and girls, a submission to the Organization of American States San Salvador Protocol Working Group on the rights of rural and Indigenous women in the Americas, the production of an amicus brief before the Inter-American Court on Human Rights in the case of the Indigenous Communities of the Lhaka Honhat Association v. Argentina, and advocacy with the UN Commission on the Status of Women on the rights to food and food sovereignty of Indigenous and rural women.

• Viviana Díaz-Balsera

  Professor

  Email: vdiaz-balsera@miami.edu

  Department of Modern Languages and Literatures

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  Viviana Díaz Balsera is Professor of Spanish.  She works on early modern epistemologies with emphasis on colonial Mexico. In her research she has examined how Nahua intellectuals appropriated intersections between European-Iberian and Mesoamerican cosmogonic and socio-political imaginaries to preserve indigenous knowledges in the coercive environment of Spanish colonization. Her current research is on the Franciscan missions in La Florida and the role of extant bilingual literature in the globalization of the Timucua peoples.

• Tracy Devine Guzmán

  Assoc. Professor

  Email: tdguzman@miami.edu

  Department of Modern Languages and Literatures

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  Tracy Devine Guzmán teaches in Latin American Studies and Global Indigenous Studies with an emphasis on Brazil, the Andes, and South-South relations. Her research and teaching interests include cultural and intellectual history, social and political theory, and cultural production, especially as these fields intersect with questions of race/ethnicity, environmentalism, and animal studies. Her current book project, “Transcontinental Indigeneities: Linking the Americas and the Global South,” traces the flow of Native and non-Native engagements with diverse notions of indigeneity across the Atlantic, from the colonial period to the present. She is also editing a volume called Teaching Indigenous Studies in/of Latin America for the Modern Languages Association. Outside UM, you can find her advocating against speciesism and entertaining her rescue mutts.
  
  Devine Guzmán serves on the advisory board for the US Network for Democracy in Brazil and is a Research Fellow with the Washington Brazil Office in 2022-24. You can find some of her work here.

• Caleb Everett

  Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs

  Professor

  Email: caleb@miami.edu

  Department of Anthropology

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  Caleb's research examines language and its interaction with nonlinguistic cognition, culture, and the environment. For more information and a more complete list of Caleb's publications, visit his personal site.

• Tamar Ezer

  Acting Director, Human Rights Clinic

  Lecturer

  Email: txe127@miami.edu

  School of Law

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  Tamar Ezer, LL.M., J.D., is the Acting Director and a Lecturer in Law with the Human Rights Clinic at the University of Miami School of Law. Prior to that, Tamar taught and supervised projects at Yale Law School as a Lecturer in Law and Visiting Scholar with the Schell Center for International Human Rights and as Executive Director of the Solomon Center for Health Law and Policy. Tamar further taught International Women’s Rights at Tulane Law School’s summer program and at Georgetown University Law Center’s International Women’s Human Rights Clinic, where she supervised test cases challenging discriminatory laws and oversaw fact-finding and legislative projects in Nigeria, Swaziland, Tanzania, Uganda, and the Philippines. Additionally, Tamar served as Deputy Director of the Law and Health Initiative of the Open Society Public Health Program, where she focused on legal advocacy to advance health and human rights in Eastern and Southern Africa, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia. This encompassed work on reproductive health, violations in health care settings, HIV, palliative care, drug policy, Roma health, and intersections between access to justice and health. Tamar also clerked for Judge Robert Sweet at the Southern District of New York and Justice Dorit Beinisch at the Supreme Court of Israel. Tamar graduated from Stanford University and Harvard Law School, where she was the editor-in-chief of the Harvard Human Rights Journal.

  Tamar’s research focuses on health and human rights, access to justice, women’s rights, children’s rights, and human rights pedagogy, and she has a particular interest in Indigenous women’s rights. Please find some of her publications at https://www.law.miami.edu/faculty/tamar-ezer. Student projects she has supervised include a submission to the Canadian National Inquiry on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls and advocacy with various United Nations bodies to address intersections between gender-based violence against Indigenous peoples and environmental justice.

• Krista Goff

  Associate Professor

  Email: kgoff@miami.edu

  Department of History

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  Krista Goff is a Soviet historian who specializes in studying minoritized populations in the Caucasus region. In her research and teaching she explores themes such as nationalism, citizenship, empire, ethnic conflict, genocide, and migration. Her first book, Nested Nationalism: Making and Unmaking Nations in the Soviet Caucasus (Cornell UP, 2020), explores the politics and practices of managing nontitular, sub-republic national minority identifications and communities in the Soviet Union. It draws on archival and oral history research that Goff conducted in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Dagestan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, and Moscow. Nested Nationalism won the Association for the Study of Nationalities Rothschild Prize, the Reginald Zelnik Book Prize in History from the Association for Slavic, East Eurpean, and Eurasian Studies, and that Baker-Burton Award from the European Section of the Southern Historical Association. Goff is also co-editor with Lewis Siegelbaum of Empire of Belonging in the Eurasian Borderlands (Cornell UP, 2019).

• Krista Lyons

  Director, Pre-Collegiate and Collegiate Planning

  Email: k.lyons1@miami.edu

  Division of Continuing & International Education

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  Krista Lyons serves as the director of the University of Miami Division of Continuing & International Education’s collegiate and pre-collegiate programs. Krista primarily oversees program development and management for the Summer Scholars Program and the Miami Semester Visiting Student Program, where she promotes and fosters student success, preparing high school students for college and facilitating international and visiting students with their transition to the University of Miami. Prior to this, Krista started her career at the University with the Study Abroad team in 2009.

  As an accomplished marketing and communication professional, Krista worked in publishing for over eight years, where she gained experience in magazine management and advertising. Prior to relocating to Miami, she spent 11 years in Moscow developing her skills in brand development and international marketing with Hearst Corporation’s Russian venture, where she worked with the Russian editions of magazines like Marie Claire and Cosmopolitan. This is where Krista honed her leadership skills as she played an instrumental role in bringing brands to a new level of awareness in the Russian market. Always an advocate of international relations, she also served as a consular assistant at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow.

  Krista received her BA in psychology and Russian studies from the University of Rochester and an MA in public relations from the University of Miami. She has also studied abroad in Russia at the Kalinin State University and Plekhanov Russian University of Economics, as well as completed the Standard Professional Publishing Course for established book and magazine publishing professionals.

• Nicholas Metheny

  Assistant Professor

  Email: nxm982@miami.edu

  School of Nursing and Health Studies

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  Nicholas Metheny, PhD, MPH, RN is a settler nurse-scientist whose research focuses on the structural determinants of intimate partner violence and its negative health implications in multiply marginalized populations globally, including LGBTQ and Two-Spirit Indigenous men who have sex with men. He is a member of the Indigenous Health Equity pillar of the Nursing Now initiative, a global advocacy network sponsored by the World Health Organization, which advocates for embedding Indigenous cultural safety practices into nursing education. He currently serves on the Secretariat of the Lancet Commission on Gender Based Violence and the Maltreatment of Young People. 

• Timothy Norris

  Librarian Associate Professor

  Data Scientist

  Email: txn60@miami.edu

  University of Miami Libraries

  Institute for Data Science and Computing

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  Timothy Norris, PhD is a Librarian Associate Professor at University of Miami Libraries, and Data Scientist at the Institute for Data Science and Computing, who studies the flow of data through academic research and society at large. His work focuses on geographic information systems (GIS) and geospatial data visualizations (cartography), participatory research methodologies, and how the sustainable governance of human, natural and informational (data) resources intersect. This research builds upon a prior non-academic career with work focused on community-based mapping and public engagement as tools to mediate public/private relationships centered on the management and governance of natural resources in the global south. Throughout his career he has worked with individuals, communities and organizations practicing this kind of “New Cartography” in Belize, Nevada, Virginia, Malaysian Borneo, the Andes of Peru, and most recently in informal settlements on the Caribbean coast of Colombia. The outcome of this work is to better understand the management and governance of natural and informational resources, how the governance of natural resources and information are intertwined, and how to make geospatial technologies more available, accessible, and meaningful to undeserved communities at scales from local to global.

   

• Raymond Orr

  Elizabeth B. White Endowed Professor in Political Science

  Email: rxo310@miami.edu

  College of Arts and Sciences

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  Dr. Raymond Orr is the Elizabeth B. White Endowed Chair and Professor of Political Science. Before joining UM, he was the Mae and John Hueston Distinguished Professor in Native American and Indigenous Studies and Associate Professor at Dartmouth College. his prior appointments include serving as the Department Chair of Native American Studies at the University of Oklahoma and teaching comparative and Indigenous politics at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Dr. Orr received my PhD in Political Science from UC Berkeley and have been a post-doctoral fellow at Princeton's Department of Politics, Yale's Program in Race, Ethnicity and Migration, and the University of Washington's Native Elder Research Center. He is currently a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Institute for Social Equity at The University of Melbourne.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

• William Pestle

  Director of Latin American Studies

  Associate Professor

  Email: w.pestle@miami.edu

  Latin American Studies Program

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  Will Pestle is a bioarchaeologist interested in the reconstruction of the lifeways of the prehistoric peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean. In his research, he uses a variety of biogeochemical analytical techniques to study patterns of subsistence, mobility, and environmental interaction in prehistoric human populations. He is in the third year of an international multi-disciplinary effort tracing patterns of exchange and migration in the Formative Period of the Atacama Desert of northern Chile, and is beginning a three-year NSF-funded project looking at the lived effects of Tiwanaku influence in Middle Period San Pedro de Atacama. Also, after 10 years of work at the southern Puerto Rican site of Tibes, he is now the director of a regional project focused on human-environment interaction in the western Puerto Rican municipality of Añasco.

• Kate Ramsey

  Associate Professor

  2017 Hemispheric and Caribbean Studies Faculty Lead - UMIA

  Email: kramsey@miami.edu

  Department of History

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  Kate Ramsey works on Caribbean history and culture. Her research and teaching interests include the politics of religion, law, and performance; medicine and healing in the Atlantic world; Caribbean intellectual history, artistic production, and social movements; and the connection between anthropology and history. Her first book, The Spirits and the Law: Vodou and Power in Haiti (Chicago, 2011), examines the history and legacies of penal and ecclesiastical laws against the Vodou religion in Haiti. It won the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians First Book Prize, the Elsa Goveia Book Prize from the Association of Caribbean Historians, the Haitian Studies Association Haiti Illumination Project Book Prize, and a Médaille Jean Price-Mars from the Faculté d’Ethnologie, Université d’État d’Haïti. Ramsey is co-editor with Louis Herns Marcelin of Transformative Visions: Works by Haitian Artists from the Permanent Collection (Lowe Art Museum, 2015). She was the recipient of a 2015-2018 UM College of Arts and Sciences Gabelli Senior Scholar Award.

  Her next single-authored book project studies how Afro-Caribbean religions became a touchstone in the fields of mind-body medicine and psychology in the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Atlantic world. It centers, first, on how early writings about Afro-Caribbean spiritual practices shaped and were shaped by medical ideas about the imagination during the final decades of slavery in the British Caribbean. It goes on to examine how following emancipation, and with the arrival of asylums across the region, colonial elites pathologized Afro-Caribbean religions in increasingly psychological terms. Focusing on mid- to late nineteenth century Jamaica in particular, the study analyzes how religious communities rejected and reversed such diagnoses, combatting colonial pathologies through spiritually-empowered forms of political struggle.

  Ramsey’s current research centers, as well, on the history of Vodou objects confiscated by U.S. marines during the 1915-1934 occupation of Haiti, and thereafter donated or sold to anthropology, natural history, and military museums in the United States and beyond. Based on collaborative research with Rachel Beauvoir-Dominique, this project spotlights the interlinked histories of Afro-Caribbean religion, U.S. imperialism, and museum collecting during the early to mid-twentieth century.

• Jyotika Ramaprasad

  Professor

  Email: jyotika@miami.edu

  School of Communications

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  Jyotika Ramaprasad is Professor in the School of Communication at the University of Miami. Her research interests include communication for social change and journalism studies, and are international in scope, particularly focused on Africa and Asia though more recently she has also worked in Europe. Ramaprasad has edited two research books, both related to the study of journalists. She has also published her research in various journals. Ramaprasad’s work in the social/behavioral change communication arena includes work on HIV communication in Ugandan slums, on flood preparedness messaging in the lagoons of Vietnam, and on communicative interactions with health care providers among the Roma people of Macedonia. Most recently, she has worked on communication for a ULINK project on designing artificial reefs to reduce wave damage in Miami Beach, Florida. These projects place local culture front and center, and this has led to Ramaprasad’s teaching interest in intercultural communication, with a recent focus on indigenous communities.

• Suja Sawafta

  Assistant Professor

  Email: srs366@miami.edu

  Department of Modern Languages & Literatures

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  Suja Sawafta is an Assistant Professor of Arabic Studies in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at the University of Miami. Her research focuses on exile and ecocriticism at the Franco-Arab intersection. She is currently working on her first book project which examines the impact of exile, intellectual commitment, and political dissent in the works of the formative Saudi-Iraqi novelist Abdulrahman Munif. She teaches interdisciplinary content courses on literature and cinema as well as Arabic and French language.

• Meryl Shriver-Rice

  Director, Education

  Email: mshriverrice@umiami.edu

  Abess Center for Ecosystem Science and Policy

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  Dr. Shriver-Rice is the Director of Environmental Media at the Abess Center for Ecosystem Science and Policy. As both a visual anthropologist and palaeoethnobotanist, her interdisciplinary background includes dual degrees in Anthropology and Biology, a Master’s degree in Archaeology (University of Nottingham, England), and a Ph.D in Interactive Media, Film, and Visual Culture (University of Miami). Her archaeological work investigates the organic evidence for paleoecology, prehistoric agriculture, and trade in consumables amongst the pre-Roman city-states of modern day Tuscany. Her current media studies research focuses on the intersection of science, digital culture, and corporate branding in shaping societal values and perceptions of the environment.

• Daniel Suman

  Professor

  Email: d.suman@miami.edu

  Department of Marine Ecosystems and Society

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  My work focuses on management of coastal areas, including mechanisms to increase institutional cooperation, capacity building, development of management plans, and reduction of conflicts between various resource users. Marine and coastal protected areas and adaptation to climate change are additional areas of my work. I dedicate much of my effort to work in the Caribbean Basin and Latin America but also work around the world.

  My undergraduate work in Chemistry and Latin American Studies was at Middlebury College (1972).  I earned Masters degrees in Education and Latin American Studies from Columbia University (1978), a Ph.D. in Oceanography from Scripps Institution of Oceanography (University of California, San Diego), and a J.D. with specialization in Environmental Law from the University of California, Berkeley (1991).

• Donn J. Tilson

  Associate Professor

  Email: dtilson@miami.edu

  School of Communication

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  Donn J. Tilson, Associate Professor emeritus, School of Communication, has published and lectured extensively on public relations and religion, including as a U.S. State Department Fulbright Scholar in interfaith dialogue (University of Ottawa). Recognized as one of the leading scholars in the field , his research has explored devotion and campaigning, public relations and religious diversity, religion and tourism, and the role of faith in shaping social responsibility. His book, The Promotion of Devotion: Religion, Culture, and Communication, a pioneering work, has just been published as a revised second edition (Cognella). He continues to explore the confluence of public relations and faith in ancient civilizations, Indigenous peoples, and other present-day societies. Additionally, while on faculty, he developed programming for a groundbreaking exhibition, Student Spiritual Treasures, at UM’s Lowe Art Museum, the first of its kind on a college campus in the world. His courses at UM included undergraduate and graduate-level International Public Relations, Religion, Culture and Communication, and at UOttawa, Public Relations and Diversity in Society.