Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Mark Rifkin

Professor, Department of English

Email: m_rifkin@uncg.edu
Website

Appointed through Spring 2024

Dr. Rifkin received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 2003.  His research primarily focuses on Native American writing and politics from the eighteenth century onward, exploring the ways that Indigenous peoples have negotiated U.S. racial and imperial formations. His work explores the roles of gender, sexuality, affect, and eroticism in those processes, addressing legal and administrative frameworks, textual representations, and forms of everyday experience.  He is the author of seven books: Speaking for the People: Native Writing and the Question of Political Form (2021); Fictions of Land and Flesh: Blackness, Indigeneity, Speculation (2019); Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination (2017); Settler Common Sense: Queerness and Everyday Colonialism in the American Renaissance (2014); The Erotics of Sovereignty: Queer Native Writing in the Era of Self-Determination (2012); When Did Indians Become Straight?: Kinship, the History of Sexuality, and Native Sovereignty (2011); and Manifesting America: The Imperial Construction of U.S. National Space (2009).  He also co-edited an award-winning special issue of GLQ, “Sexuality, Nationality, Indigeneity” (2010).  He has served as president of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, and he is a former director of the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at UNCG.