Philip Deloria

Philip J. Deloria is the Leverett Saltonstall Professor of History at Harvard University, where his research and teaching focus on the social, cultural and political histories of the relations among American Indian peoples and the United States, as well as the comparative and connective histories of indigenous peoples in a global context.  He is a Harvard College Professor, the former Chair of the Committee on Degrees in History and Literature, and current interim chair of the American Studies program.

His first book, Playing Indian (1998), traced the tradition of white “Indian play” from the Boston Tea Party to the New Age movement, while his 2004 book Indians in Unexpected Places examined the ideologies surrounding Indian people in the early twentieth century and the ways Native Americans challenged them through sports, travel, automobility, and film and musical performance.  He is the co-editor of The Blackwell Companion to American Indian History (with Neal Salisbury) and C.G. Jung and the Sioux Traditions by Vine Deloria (with Jerome Bernstein).  Co-authored with Alexander Olson, American Studies: A User’s Guide (2017), offers a comprehensive treatment of the historiography and methodology of the field of American Studies.  His most recent book is Becoming Mary Sully: Toward an American Indian Abstract (2019), which reclaims a previously unknown Native artist while offering a new exploration of American Indian visual arts of the mid-twentieth century. His reclamation of Sully’s art has led to the acclaimed exhibition Mary Sully: Native Modern, a single artist show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (July 18, 2024-January 12, 2025) and the Minneapolis Institute of Art (March 15-September 20, 2025), as well as Sully’s inclusion in exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, the Ford Foundation Gallery, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the St. Louis Museum of Art, and the Mead Museum of Art, among others. 

Deloria received the Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University in 1994, taught for six years at the University of Colorado, and then at the University of Michigan from 2001 to 2017, before joining the faculty at Harvard in January 2018. At Michigan, he served as the Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education, Director of the Program in American Culture, and of the Native American Studies Program, and held the Carroll Smith-Rosenberg Collegiate Chair.  His courses have included American Indian history, Environmental history, the American West, and American Studies methods, as well as Food Studies, Songwriting, and Big History. 

Deloria served four terms as a trustee of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian, where for many years he chaired the Repatriation Committee.  He currently serves on the board of the Wenner-Gren Foundation and is a Senior Fellow in Garden and Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks.  He is former president of the American Studies Association, the Organization of American Historians, and the Society of American Historians.  An elected member of the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he is the recipient of numerous prizes and recognitions.