Advisor:
Andrew Fisher
Email:
[[jtestreicher]] Current Research:
United States, Native American/Indigenous Peoples, Cultural/Intellectual
Bio
Justin Estreicher's research focuses on the interactions of Native and Euro-American societies, with an emphasis on representation, assimilation policy, colonial ideologies, and cultural histories of Indianness. 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 representations 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, including the use of prohibitions on gold mining to "manufacture" the savagery of the Cherokees in the 1820s and 1830s to justify their removal from Georgia, as well as the manifestation of biological essentialist thinking about Native capacities for civilization in the representation of the ancient Cliff Dwellers of the Southwest as racially distinct from modern Indians 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.
