Philip J. Deloria

Philip J. Deloria’s scholarship focuses on the cultural history of interactions between American Indians and North American colonists. Among his many writings, Playing Indian (1998) detailed the ways Anglo-Americans created modern American nationhood by imagining and then performing themselves as “Indians.” In Indians in Unexpected Places (2004), he examined violence, sports, music, film, and technology to reveal Indian people shaping American modernity. Becoming Mary Sully (2019) explores American Indian arts of the 1930s, through the figure of his great-aunt.  His significant professional service includes President of the American Studies Association, Trustee of the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, President of the Organization of American Historians (2022), member of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities (2023), and a strong record of innovation as an academic administrator at the University of Michigan.