Cogut Institute for the Humanities

Patricia Rubertone

Spring 2025 Faculty Fellow, Professor of Anthropology
Project “Unsettling Providence: Politics of Erasure and Indigenous Persistence in a Settler Colonial City”
Last updated June 21, 2024

Biography

Patricia E. Rubertone is Professor of Anthropology and a historical archaeologist with interests in settler colonialism, landscape and memory, and Indigenous survivance. Her research intersects archaeology, anthropology, history, and Native American and Indigenous Studies to explore the lives and colonial experiences of Native people and the effects of colonialist and collaborative scholarship on their histories and futurities. She is the author of Native Providence: Memory, Community, and Survivance in the Northeast (University of Nebraska Press, 2020), winner of a Choice Outstanding Academic Title award, and Grave Undertakings: An Archaeology of Roger Williams and the Narragansett Indians (Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001). She is also the editor of Archaeologies of Placemaking: Monuments, Memories, and Engagement in Native North America (Left Coast Press, 2008). Her project at the Cogut Institute builds on her latest research on Providence to examine forms of spatial and symbolic violence in settler colonial cities contributing to the erasure of Indigenous modernity and to shed new light on Indigenous persistence in the context of domicide, ruination, and right-to-the-city discourses.