Kimberly Takahata

I research and teach courses in literatures of the Americas to 1900, with an emphasis on the long eighteenth century. Within this capacious field, I focus on the intersection of Indigenous Studies and settler colonial studies, paying attention to how creators and communities appear in and mark written texts. I am currently at work on a monograph entitled, “The Care that Remains: Returning Ancestral Narratives in the Early Atlantic.” While the awful thefts of Indigenous ancestral remains in the nineteenth century have received important attention, this project turns to the narrative pre-history of such violations, tracing how settlers used texts like natural histories to erase Indigenous ancestral remains’ connection to place and kin. Simultaneously, I examine how these very texts continue to register descendants always caring for their ancestors, and moreover, how Indigenous writers use literature as a crucial space to care for ancestors up through the present day. 

I am a co-creator of Digital Grainger, a teaching edition of James Grainger’s 1764 georgic poem The Sugar Cane. I currently serve as the Indigenous Studies editor of Insurrect!, an online publication devoted to anti-colonial frameworks and critiques of racial capitalism in Early American Studies.