Overview
Sarah LaVoy-Brunette is an enrolled member of the White Earth Nation of Ojibwe and currently a seventh-year PhD Candidate in the Medieval Studies Program, a Graduate Minor in American Indian and Indigenous Studies, and a PhD member of Cornell’s Institute of Archaeology and Material Studies. During this academic year, Sarah will be finishing her dissertation as the 2025/26 Henry Roe Cloud fellow in American Indian and Indigenous Studies at Yale University, hosted by American Studies and the Yale Group for the Study of Native America. While at Cornell, Sarah has also been awarded the Summer Graduate Fellowship in Digital Humanities (2024), the Zhu Family Graduate Fellowship (2023–24), the Avalon Fellowship (2022, 2024), and the Dean’s McNair Fellowship (2019).
In her research, Sarah 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 dissertation project 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.
Research Focus
- Critical Indigenous studies
- Indigenous place-based methods
- Settler colonial studies
- Landscape studies
- Early English literature and material culture
- Premodern critical race studies
- History of art
- Ecocriticism
- Modern legal history
- Hodinǫ̱hsǫ́:nih studies
Courses taught:
AIIS 1100: Indigenous North America (Fall 2021/Fall2022, Graduate TA)
- MEDVL 1101: Women in Medieval Art and Literature (Fall 2020, Instructor of Record)
Publications
- with Dusti C. Bridges, “Anglo-Saxonism and Indigenous Dispossession: Land-Grab Universities and the Emergence of Medieval Studies.” In the Medieval Academy of America’s Centennial Themed Issue, "Medieval Studies and Its Institutions," ed. Roland Betancourt and Karla Mallette. Speculum 100:1 (January 2025): 46-78. doi.org/10.1086/733212.
- with Jordan Chauncy. “Settler Fantasies and Queer Disruptions: A Nonbinary Reading of Gerald’s Wolves,” invited contribution to “Medieval Trans Natures,” ed. Aylin Malcolm and Nat Rivkin. Special Issue, Medieval Ecocriticisms 4 (2024): 17-38.
- Forthcoming: with Tarren Andrews, Emily Bange, Christopher Fletcher, Haley Guepet, Alexis Howlett, Alex Lee, Veronica Mendali, Natalie Robertson, and Benjamin Weil, “Reflections on ‘Thinking and Working Beyond the Medieval Archive,’” in Beyond Medieval Archives, ed. Carl Kears and Fran Brooks. UCL Press, 2025.
In the news
- Sarah LaVoy-Brunette awarded a Henry Roe Cloud Fellowship, Yale
- Sarah LaVoy-Brunette, Ph.D. Candidate in Medieval Studies, publishes article in Speculum
- LaVoy-Brunette and Chauncy publish in Medieval Ecocriticisms
- Sarah LaVoy-Brunette awarded a Zhu Family Graduate Fellowship
- 2023 Medieval Studies Student Colloquium