Kaplan Lecture 2025 with Philip Deloria

Join us for the 2025 Kaplan Lecture with Professor Philip Deloria on Thursday, November 13 at 4:30 pm in the Fine Arts Center Lobby.

Philip J. Deloria is Professor of History at Harvard University. His first book, Playing Indian (1998), traced the tradition of white “Indian play” from the Boston Tea Party to the New Age movement, while his 2004 book Indians in Unexpected Places examined the ideologies surrounding Indian people in the early twentieth century and the ways Native Americans challenged them through sports, travel, automobility, and film and musical performance. He is the co-editor of The Blackwell Companion to American Indian History (with Neal Salisbury) and C.G. Jung and the Sioux Traditions by Vine Deloria (with Jerome Bernstein). He recently co-authored with Alexander Olson American Studies: A User’s Guide (2017), which offers a comprehensive treatment of the historiography and methodology of the field of American Studies. His most recent book is Becoming Mary Sully: Toward an American Indian Abstract (2019), which reclaims the Dakota artist’s work from obscurity, exploring her stunning portfolio through the lenses of modernism, industrial design, Dakota women’s aesthetics, mental health, ethnography and anthropology, primitivism, and the American Indian politics of the 1930s. He is currently completing a project on American Indian visual arts of the mid-twentieth century, and coediting (with Beth Piatote) I Heart Nixon: Essays on the Indigenous Everyday.

Deloria received the Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University in 1994, taught for six years at the University of Colorado, and then at the University of Michigan from 2001 to 2017, before joining the faculty at Harvard in January 2018. At Michigan, he served as the Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education, Director of the Program in American Culture, and of the Native American Studies Program, and held the Carroll Smith-Rosenberg Collegiate Chair.