Biography

Dr. Shannon Speed, is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation.  Dr. Speed is Director of the American Indian Studies Center, Professor of American Indian Studies, Anthropology, and Gender Studies, and Special Advisor to the Chancellor on Native American and Indigenous Affairs at UCLA. Dr. Speed has worked for twenty-five years in Mexico and the United States on issues of indigenous rights, gender, neoliberalism,  violence, migration, and activist research. Her books include the award-winning Incarcerated Stories: Indigenous Women Migrants and Violence in the Settler Capitalist State (UNC Press 2020) and the co-edited volume with Dr. Lynn Stephen, Heightened States of Injustice: Activist Research on Indigenous Women and Violence (University of  Arizona Press 2021). She is currently working on a new book with her own tribal nation entitled, “Chickasaw Rising: Law and Resurgent Sovereignty in the Chickasaw Nation.” She is a recipient of the Chickasaw Dynamic Woman of the Year award from the Chickasaw Nation and the President’s Award from the American Anthropological Association (AAA), and most recently awarded by the Alumni Scholars Club and UCLA Alumni Association the Marty Sklar My Last Lecture Award in May 2023.  Dr. Speed has also served as the President of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA 2018-2021).  Today Gender Studies celebrates the appointment of Professor Speed as the Paula Gunn Allen Chair in Gender Studies.  Paula Gunn Allen (1939-2008), a prominent Indigenous feminist writer and scholar who was a faculty member at UCLA from 1990 to 1999. Dr. Allen was a faculty member of the Department of English and was closely connected to the American Indian Studies Center. She was a leading scholar, writer and feminist whose outstanding academic contribution was to establish a canon of Native American literature and to ensure that Indigenous voices were included in literature classes on U.S. college campuses and well beyond.