About
Christopher Pexa specializes in 19th and 20th century Native American and U.S. literatures, Native American studies, and settler colonial studies, with an emphasis on questions of indigenous ethics, sovereignty, and nationalism. He is completing a book, under contract with University of Minnesota Press, entitled Translated Nation: Rewriting the Dakota Oyate, that explores the ambivalent ways in which allotment-era Dakota authors played to white regimes of legibility while at the same time honoring tribal common sense and producing a contemporary Dakota nationhood. Pexa’s essays have appeared or are forthcoming in PMLA, Wíčazo Ša Review, SAIL, and MELUS. He is also a published poet and is currently working on a book of prose poetry, entitled Throne of Horses, about the afterlives of Indian boarding schools. Education
Cornell University: Andrew W. Mellon Diversity Postdoctoral Associate, 2013-15; Mellon Dissertation Fellow, 2012-13
Vanderbilt University: Ph.D. in English, 2013; M.A. in English, 2008
Arizona State University: M.F.A. in Creative Writing (Poetry), 2003
University of Cambridge: Marshall Scholar, Graduate work in Social Anthropology, 1998-1999
Arizona State University: B.A. in Religious Studies, 1998, Summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, Barrett Honors College Outstanding Graduate
Publications
Review, “Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s The White Possessive,” forthcoming, Native American and Indigenous Studies
Article, “More Than Talking Animals: Charles Alexander Eastman’s Animal Peoples and Their Kinship Critiques of U.S. Empire,” PMLA 131.6 (May 2016): 652-67
Article, “Citizen Kin: Charles Eastman’s Revisions of United States Citizenship,” forthcoming, SAIL
Article, “Futurity Foreclosed: Jonestown, Trauma, and the Ending of Time in Fred D’Aguiar’s Bill of Rights,” forthcoming, MELUS
Review, “Glen Sean Coulthard’s Red Skin, White Masks,” American Studies Journal 54.2 (Summer 2015): 130-31
Article, “Transgressive Adoptions: Dakota Prisoners’ Resistances to Confinements Following the 1862 U.S.-Dakota War,” Wicazo Sa Review 30.1 (Spring 2015): 29-56
Poem, “The Ministry of Inside Things,” The Collagist 61 (August 2014)
Poem, “It Takes More Than a Robin to Make Winter Cold,” Coachella Review (Fall 2012)
Poem, “There will be no translation,” MiPOesias 24.1 (January 2011)
Poems, “The Boy,” “Homage to Cesar Vallejo,” “Two Poems for Delmore Schwartz,” Juked 7 (Fall 2010)
Poem, “Conversion Blues,” 42Opus (January 2010)
“Editors’ Commentary” (co-editor), Wicazo Sa Review 20.2 (Fall 2005): 5-13
Poem, “Are Not All Things Lovely Far Away,” Crab Orchard Review (Winter/Spring 2005)
Short story, “Radio Gun,” Hayden’s Ferry Review (Spring 2005)
Projects
Book manuscript, Translated Nation: Rewriting the Dakota Oyate, 1862-1934, under contract with University of Minnesota Press
Book manuscript, Sovereign Mobilities: Indigenous Future-Making Beyond Borders, in progress Memberships
American Comparative Literature Association
American Indian Studies Association
American Studies Association
Modern Language Association
Native American and Indigenous Studies Association
