Medieval Studies PhD candidate Sarah LaVoy-Brunette has been named the 2025/26 Henry Roe Cloud Dissertation Writing Fellow in American Indian and Indigenous Studies at Yale University. The Henry Roe Cloud Fellowship honors the legacy of Henry Roe Cloud (Ho-Chunk), a member of the Ho-Chunk Nation of Nebraska and graduate of Yale College, 1910. Since 2010, the Roe Cloud Fellowship has helped to develop American Indian Studies at Yale by facilitating the completion of the doctorate by scholars working on pressing issues related to the American Indian experience.
Sarah is an enrolled member of the White Earth Nation of Ojibwe and a PhD Candidate in the Medieval Studies Program with a Graduate Minor in American Indian and Indigenous Studies at Cornell University. Her dissertation project, “Converting the Wilderness: The Legacies of Settler Colonialism in Early Medieval England and Hodinǫ̱hsǫ́:nihgeh,” employs critical Indigenous studies to analyze the transcolonial legacies of settler colonialism and Indigenous erasure across the medieval-modern divide. Critically oriented around Place and the role of Land in identity formation, her work discusses the ways in which settler colonial ideologies are embedded in the literary, material, and visual cultures of early medieval England and exported later across Hodinǫ̱hsǫ́:nihgeh (Haudenosaunee homelands).
