Laura Terrance, PhD
Akwesasne Mohawk, Wolf Clan
I am an Assistant Professor of Indigenous Studies at the University at Buffalo.
Since my 2009 appearance in a graduate student film on revenge, I have been thinking and writing about violence on the settler body. My research and thinking developed further during my tenure at UCLA starting in 2012. Over the course of my time there, I determined that the settler body is an embodiment of the state and the threat it poses to Indigenous and other racialized bodies. I also determined that the violence of revenge can be generative of as a mode of confrontation that allows for the imagination of alternative futures. This thinking and my research culminated in my 2022 dissertation which now informs my current monograph, Generative Violence: Rotisken:rakete and the Unsavage Body.
Select Presentations
2023
Native American & Indigenous Studies Association
“Refusing Death: Indigenous and Black Revenge and Relationality”
2021
Native American & Indigenous Studies Association
“Vengeance is Ecstasy: The Anti-Colonial in Indigenous Cultural Production”
2018
American Studies Association
“Violence and Pleasure: Indigenous Cultural Production and Anti-Colonial Subjectivity”
2014
Native American & Indigenous Studies Association
“Seeing Red: An Anti-Colonial Aesthetic of Embodied and Performed Sovereignty”
Select Invited Talks
2023
“Anti-Colonial Representations of Revenge: Indigenous Cultural Production Meets Mental Health”
2022
“Violence in the Indigenous Imagination”
2020
“Indigenous Representations of Revenge”
2017
“Why Representations of Violence in Indigenous Cultural Production Matter”