Scott Richard Lyons

Raised at Leech Lake Reservation in Minnesota, Scott Lyons, Ojibwe/Mdewakanton Dakota, specializes in Native American and global indigenous literatures and cultural studies. His first book, X-marks: Native Signatures of Assent (University of Minnesota Press), examines the potentials and present uses of so-called "non-traditional" ideas, technologies, and concepts by Natives engaging colonization and its aftermath. Lyons is also an essayist and public commentator on Indian issues, having recently published a personal essay about Vine Deloria, Jr. in the popular collection Sovereign Bones: New Native American Writing (Nation Books) , a reflection on Lewis Henry Morgan in A New Literary History of America (Harvard), and commentaries on a wide range of subjects in Indian Country Today . He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on nineteenth-century and progressive-era Native American literature, "Red Power" and the Native American Renaissance, global indigenous literature, and representations of "the Indian" in American literature. Lyons is currently engaged in a study of the important Ojibwe writer Gerald Vizenor, and he maintains a long-held interest in indigenous languages.

Areas of Supervision: Professor Lyons has supervised M.A. and Ph.D. theses in Native American/indigenous studies and cultural studies. Subjects have included Natives and the New Museology, historical rhetorics of the "borderlands," and identity issues in the fiction of Sherman Alexie. As well, he is interested in working with graduate students on post/coloniality and nationalism, the politics of globalism and empire, postmodern ethnicity and identity, and theories of the public sphere.

Curriculum Vitae