• PhD, English, University of Pennsylvania, 2003
• BA, English and American Studies, Rutgers University, 1996

His scholarship is in Native American and Indigenous Studies and queer studies, focusing on Indigenous self-representation and the dynamics of U.S. settler colonialism from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries. This work addresses how official and popular discourses legitimize nonnative occupation of Indigenous lands, particularly the gendered and heteronormative dynamics of those processes, while attending to the complex ways Native peoples have engaged with such colonial categorization, displacement, and regulation. Within this broader frame, he has explored the ways placing Native peoples at the center allows us to reimagine the history of sexuality, focusing on how discourses of sexuality relate to questions of land tenure, political identity, and state jurisdiction, and his work has addressed the ways that forms of everyday experience -- eroticism, perception, temporality -- take part in processes of imposing and opposing settler rule and sustaining indigeneity.  He also has written extensively about the relations among varied processes of racialization in the context of US empire.  His scholarship has been awarded a number of national prizes, including the John Hope Franklin Prize for best book in American Studies and the award from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals for best special issue, and he has served as president of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA).

• The Cambridge Introduction to Queer and Trans Studies. Cambridge University Press (forthcoming 2025).
• The Politics of Kinship: Race, Family, Governance.  Duke University Press, 2024.
• Speaking for the People: Native Writing and the Question of Political Form.  Duke University Press, 2021
• Fictions of Land and Flesh: Blackness, Indigeneity, Speculation, Duke University Press, 2019.
• Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination, Duke University Press, 2017.
• Settler Common Sense: Queerness and Everyday Colonialism in the American Renaissance, University of Minnesota Press, 2014.
• The Erotics of Sovereignty: Queer Native Writing in the Era of Self-Determination, University of Minnesota Press, 2012.
• When Did Indians Become Straight?: Kinship, The History of Sexuality, and Native Sovereignty, Oxford University Press, 2011.
• Manifesting America: The Imperial Construction of U.S. National Space, Oxford University Press, 2009.