Philip J. Deloria

Philip J. Deloria is the Leverett Saltonstall Professor of History at Harvard University, where he specializes in Native American and Indigenous Studies and Environmental History. He has written broadly 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. Deloria earned the PhD in American Studies at Yale University, and an taught at the University of Colorado and the University of Michigan before coming to Harvard in 2018. He brings an interdisciplinary approach to teaching and scholarship in Native American arts, literature, and music, as evidenced in books such as Playing Indian, Indians in Unexpected Places, and Becoming Mary Sully: Toward an American Indian Abstract. A long serving trustee of the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, he has served as president of the American Studies Association, the Organization of American Historians, and the Society of American Historians and is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. He has played the guitar aspirationally for several decades.