Faculty Fellows
The Director of the Martin Institute and the Martin Fellow in Public Policy work closely with a group of Faculty Fellows to develop co curricular programming for the 2010-2012 theme of Indigenous Peoples.
In order to ask specific questions pertaining to the broader theme of indigenous peoples, we will organize events around four distinct but connected sub-themes. The series will be anchored around:
- "Community and Place" (Fall 2010), followed by
- "Sovereignty and Nation Building" (Spring 2011),
- "Sacredness" (Fall 2011), and in the concluding semester,
- "Global Indigenous Peoples (Spring 2012).
Each sub-theme will afford us the focus to develop concrete conversations and invite scholars, artists, and community members whose work more clearly articulates these conversations.
The Faculty Fellows charged with leading these conversations are:
Dr. Andrea Opitz has been an Instructor in the English Department at Stonehill since the fall of 2008. Prior to that, she was a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at the University of Rhode Island during the 2007-08 academic year. She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Washington in 2007.
Opitz has taught and researched Native American literature, including the work of American Indian author James Welch, extensively. Her most recent published work includes chapters in the book All Our Stories Are Here: Critical Perspectives on Montana Literature, in which she focused on cultural narratives and the persistence of the Indigenous Subject in Welch's The Heartsong of Charging Elk.
With a longstanding interest in intercultural and interdisciplinary contexts, Opitz taught Comparative Literature, American Ethnic Studies and American Indian Studies while at the University of Washington.
Rob Rodgers has been a member of Stonehill's Political Science Department since the fall of 2008. From 2006-2008, he was a Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Science at Haverford College. During the 2005-06 academic year, he was the Quin Morton Teaching Fellow in the Writing Program at Princeton University. He is expected to receive his Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton this spring.
Rodgers' research interests include land use and environmental policies affecting Native Americans in the United States as well as political participation of Native Americans, both in their tribal governments and in the federal, state, and local governments of America. This spring in his Civil Rights and Civil Liberties course, Rodgers and his students will be examining civil rights issues relating to Native Americans and exploring issues of tribal sovereignty and rights of religious practice.
Dr. Chris Wetzel joined the Sociology and Criminology Department at Stonehill in the fall of 2009. Prior to his arrival, he served as a President's Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California-Los Angeles since 2007. He received his Ph.D. in Sociology from UC-Berkeley in 2007.
Wetzel's teaching and research theorize the dynamics of contemporary indigenous politics. This spring, he will teach the course Native Americans in the 21st Century as well as a seminar on Social Movements. His book manuscript One Spirit, One Nation, which he is currently revising, explains how nine Potawatomi Indian tribes have managed to articulate a vision of the nation against great odds in recent decades.
Wetzel is collaborating with Potawatomi community members to develop an oral history book. He is also in the midst of several new projects which explore how race, class, and gender have shaped debates over legalizing different forms of gaming, the persistence of land seizure as a particular strategy in Native American political contention as well as the intersection of expertise and indigeneity.
Dr. William Henry Ewell is an Assistant Professor of American political institutions and public policy. He teaches courses in American institutions and public policy, representation and political parties, state politics and policy, political economy, and political methodology.
He has recently published an article in Legislative Studies Quarterly. His research interests include Congressional institutions, politics of resource allocation and the federal budgetary process, and American social policy. More broadly his research focuses on issues of social justice and the politics of inequality.
Many of these interests inform his current research project exploring whether the U.S. government has the ability to overcome their central collective action problem, namely that Congress members are incentivized to be individually responsible but collectively irresponsible, to constrain future spending behavior.
Ewell has nearly 10 years of experience working in federal and state politics. He worked for North Carolina Governor James Hunt at the Hunt Institute for Educational Leadership and Policy. He also served as a legislative aide in the office of Senior Rhode Island United States Senator John Chafee.