Rate My Professor Audra Simpson

Audra Simpson is Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University. A political anthropologist, her scholarship contextualizes the force and consequences of governance through time, space, and bodies, rooted in Indigenous polities across the United States and Canada. Her work spans anthropology, Indigenous Studies, American and Canadian Studies, gender and sexuality studies, and politics. Simpson's recent research examines a genealogy of affective governance and extraction spanning the US and Canada. She earned her BA in Anthropology from Concordia University in 1993, her MA in Anthropology from McGill University in 1996, and her PhD in Anthropology from McGill University in 2004, with a dissertation on Kahnawake Mohawk narratives of self, home, and nation. Before joining Columbia as Assistant Professor in 2008, she held a Provost's Diversity Post-Doctoral Fellowship and a faculty position in the Anthropology Department and American Indian Program at Cornell University.

Simpson has received numerous accolades for her scholarship and teaching. Her book Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States (Duke University Press, 2014) won the Sharon Stephens Prize from the American Ethnological Society, the Best First Book Award from the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, and the Lora Romero Award from the American Studies Association, along with honorable mentions and designation as a Choice Academic Title for 2014. She co-edited Theorizing Native Studies with Andrea Smith (Duke University Press, 2014). Notable publications include “Rethinking Indigeneity: Scholarship at the Intersection of Native American Studies and Anthropology” (co-authored with Jessica Cattelino, Annual Review of Anthropology, 2022), “Consent’s Revenge” (Cultural Anthropology, 2016), “The Ruse of Consent and the Anatomy of Refusal: Cases from Indigenous America and Australia” (Postcolonial Studies, 2017), and an Afterword in When the Pine Needles Fall: Indigenous Acts of Resistance (2024). For teaching excellence, she was awarded the Mark Van Doren Award by the Columbia College Student Council in 2020 and the School of General Studies Excellence in Teaching Award in 2010. Simpson's research interests include empires, states, sovereignties; indigeneities, diasporas; slavery, colonialism, race, racial capitalism; toxicity, environment, and climate crisis; and war, nationalism, displacement, trauma.