Paul Nadasdy, associate professor of anthropology and American Indian and Indigenous studies, has been named chair of the Department of . Nadasdy assumed the role at the start of the spring 2018 semester. Adam T. Smith, Goldwin Smith Professor of , stepped down as chair in 2017.
Nadasdy joined the Department of at Cornell in the fall of 2009, after teaching at the University of Wisconsin - Madison from 2000-2009.
Nadasdy served as director of graduate studies for the American Indian and Indigenous studies Program from 2011-2014. In addition, he served as director of undergraduate studies for the Department of from July 2014 until January 2018, with a leave during the 2015/2016 academic year. Stacey Langwick, associate professor of anthropology, will serve as director of undergraduate studies for the spring 2018 semester.
A political and environmental anthropologist, Nadasdy has been conducting ethnographic research in Canada’s Yukon Territory since 1995, principally with the people of Kluane First Nation, the indigenous inhabitants of the southwest Yukon. His research focuses on the politics surrounding the production and use of environmental knowledge in wildlife management, land claim negotiations, and other political arenas. Through his research, Nadasdy hopes to develop better understandings of the changing relationship between indigenous peoples and the state.
Nadasdy received his Ph.D. in 2001 from Johns Hopkins University. His books include Hunters and Bureaucrats: Power, Knowledge, and Aboriginal-State Relations in the Southwest Yukon and the co-edited Knowing Nature: Conversations at the Intersection of Political Ecology and Science Studies. His most recent book, Sovereignty's Entailments: First Nation State Formation in the Yukon (University of Toronto Press 2017), examines how the process of state formation is transforming Yukon Indian people’s relationships with one another, animals, and the land.
In 2016, Nadasdy received the John McMenemy Prize for “First Nations, Citizenship and Animals, or Why Northern Indigenous People Might Not Want to Live in Zoopolis,” awarded for the best article published in The Canadian Journal of Political Science that year.
