Jen Rose Smith
Assistant Professor of Geography and American Indian Studies

Ph.D., Geographer

Dr. Jen Rose Smith is a dAXunhyuu (Eyak, Alaska Native) geographer interested in the intersections of coloniality, race, and indigeneity as read through aesthetic and literary contributions, archival evidences, and experiential embodied ​knowledges. An assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the Geography Department and American Indian Studies program, she earned a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in Comparative Ethnic Studies and a  Master’s Degree from the same department. Smith graduated with a BA in English Literature and the Environment from the University of Alaska, Southeast.

Smith serves on an all-Native women advisory board for the Eyak Cultural Foundation, a non-profit that organizes annual language and cultural revitalization gatherings, and directs a Cultural Mapping Project in their homelands of Eyak, Alaska. She is also an Editor as part of the Editorial Collective at the journal ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies. Smith’s research has been funded by the University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, and the Ford Foundation.

Dr. Smith’s book manuscript in process, Icy Matters: Race, Indigeneity, and Coloniality in Ice-Geographies, undertakes an analysis of coloniality and racialization in icy locales to demonstrate how ice has been a foundational object for making sense of the world and beyond. She analyzes ice in three formations: ice as a material entity and terrain of conflict; ice as a cultural and scientific imaginary; and ice as an analytic that produces a temporalized, universal logic of human historicity and futurity. By centering ice, the book investigates the milieu and non-human relations as sites and sources of analysis that are integrally bound up with colonial and racial formations.

Read more:

Smith, Jen Rose. ““Exceeding Beringia”: Upending Universal Human Events and Wayward Transits in Arctic Spaces.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space (2020).
https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775820950745

https://www.vogue.com/article/reclaiming-native-knowledges-through-kelp-farming-in-cordova-alaska