Correction Appended: The original version of this article incorrectly stated that Professor Simpson was born in Canada. She was born in the United States.
Audra Simpson is the only Native American in the anthropology department—an identity that informs both her academic interests and her sense of self.
First hired in 2008 as an assistant professor of anthropology, Simpson began teaching on campus this fall. She comes to Columbia from Cornell where she worked for four-and-a-half years, three of which were spent on tenure track.
While she may be a new name in the course directory, Simpson said she has already found Columbia students to be more willing than those at Cornell had been to enroll in a class taught by someone who hadn’t yet established a reputation at the university.
“I was stunned by my enrollments,” she said.
While zero CULPA reviews might be enough to keep students at bay in other areas of study, aspiring anthropologists were not deterred by the mystery that inevitably surrounds this new professor. Her 3000-level course, titled Introduction to Native American Studies: Indigenous North America from 1871 to the Present, has 30 students enrolled. Her 4000-level course, Critical Native and Indigenous Studies, has 24—both respectable student counts for new—and untested—classes.
Simpson carries three citizenships—Mohawk, Canadian, and American—and still goes back to her Mohawk reservation as often as possible. “My family is there, my research is there, the people I love most in the world are there,” she said.
Simpson’s research deals with the ethnography of Mohawk citizenship and how citizenship is lived in the face of colonialism. It’s a “study that began on my own reservation in Canada,” she explained. “It started with questions we were having about belonging.” Those questions have pushed her to study “the way we think about citizenship, nationality, indigeneity,” she said, describing identity as something that is both personal and political.
Simpson established a favorable reputation during her time at Cornell. Virginia Marie Kennedy, a Ph.D. candidate in English and American Indian studies who took Simpson’s graduate seminar there, said she appreciates Simpson’s input on her dissertation.
“Her students mean a great deal to her, and she takes her part in their ability to be successful very seriously,“ Kennedy said.
The early enthusiasm for Simpson’s classes could be rooted in the fact that she fills a niche in an area of research that is not always given a lot of attention at Columbia.
Simpson is now one of two Native Americans on the University’s teaching faculty. “There always needs to be more,” she said. “One is never enough. Two is never enough.”
Jessica Cattelino, an anthropology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, called Simpson a “relentless thinker and questioner who is not easily satisfied.” Moreover, Cattelino praised her sense of humor and said of Simpson, with whom she frequents anthropology conventions, “She’s also the best-dressed person on the panel.”
So far, Simpson is fond of her students here. “They seem lovely,” she said. “It’s very nice to think with them.”
Simpson mentioned that she was drawn to Columbia by “the extraordinary faculty, the tradition of anthropological inquiry in this department,” which she characterized as “probably the most exciting department in the U.S.” She appreciates the commitment and the dialogue among her colleagues but said, “I also came from a really good department at Cornell. I left a good job to come here.”
“I wish we could have kept her at Cornell,” Kennedy said. “It’s Columbia’s good fortune to have her.”
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