Justin Estreicher
Ph. D. Student (ABD)
Advisor:
Andrew Fisher
Email:
[[jtestreicher]]
Current Research:
United States, Native American/Indigenous Peoples, Cultural/Intellectual
Bio
Justin Estreicher's research focuses on cultural histories of Indianness and racial and colonial ideologies. His dissertation project explores late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ideas about Native Americans' relationship to various imagined pasts and the implications of these ideas for racial thinking in this period. He received his undergraduate degree at the University of Pennsylvania, where he completed an honors thesis on depictions of Native Americans at public amusements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In his M.A. portfolio at William & Mary, he investigated issues of Native American representation at opposite ends of the nineteenth century, from the "manufacturing" of Cherokee savagery through prohibitions on gold mining in the removal era to biological essentialist thinking informing the racial distancing of modern Indians from the ancient "Cliff Dwellers" of the Southwest at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair and in the decades that followed.He has served as a member of the editorial board of the Penn History Review, as both an editorial apprentice and an editorial fellow at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, and as an instructor for the National Institute of American History and Democracy's pre-college course "The Road to the United States Civil War." As a graduate teaching fellow in the fall 2022 semester, he taught a course on Native people in the American imagination. Among other honors, he has been awarded the Walter J. Zable Graduate Fellowship (2019–2021), the Autry Museum of the American West's Los Angeles Westerners Fellowship (2023), and the Michael R. Halleran Dissertation Completion Fellowship (2024–2025).
