Jean M. O'Brien

Jean M. O'Brien (citizen, White Earth Ojibwe Nation) is Regents Professor and McKnight Distinguished University Professor of History at University of Minnesota. O'Brien is a scholar of American Indian and Indigenous history. Her scholarship has been especially influential regarding New England's American Indian peoples in relation to European colonial settlement. O'Brien's works include: Dispossession by Degrees: Indian Land and Identity in Natick, Massachusetts, 1650-1790, in which she demonstrates the persistence of Indians in the face of market economies that first commodified, and then slowly alienated their lands; Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England, which investigates the local history writing of New England towns, which laid down the templates for American narratives of Indian disappearance; Monumental Mobility: The Memory Work of Massasoit (with Lisa Blee) that analyzes the memory work surrounding monuments to the Indigenous leader who encountered the Pilgrims in Plymouth, Massachusetts; and four edited volumes, most recently Allotment Stories: Indigenous Land Relations Under Settler Siege (with Daniel Heath Justice). She is a co-founder and past president of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association. She holds a Ph.D. from University of Chicago.