As a scholar of Native American ethnology and ethnohistory, I have been interested in ways in which Alaska Native (particularly Tlingit) cultures have changed over time while preserving some of their core values and maintaining a distinct indigenous identity. I have also researched the history of American and Russian anthropology, particularly the interaction between Boasian and Russian anthropology from the early 1900s through the 1940s. Currently I am preparing for publication an annotated book of photographs taken in Sitka, Alaska by Elbridge W. Merrill(1897-1929). I have also begun a large project on the history and culture of the Creole (Russian-Native) community of Sitka, Alaska. In addition I have recently joined a large multi-volume project dedicated to producing an annotated multi-volume edition of the professional correspondence of Franz Boas, the "father" of American anthropology; as part of an internation editorial team, I am responsible for editing the volume dealing with Boas' correspondence with his Russian colleagues.
Book Sharing Our Knowledge: the Tlingit and Their Coastal Neighbors. University of Nebraska Press. 2015.
http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/product/Sharing-Our-Knowledge,675970.aspx
Book Vincent Soboleff: A Russian-American Photographer in Tlingit Country. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. 2013.
The 2015 Western History Association Joan Patterson Kerr Award for the best illustrated book on the American West.
http://www.oupress.com/ECommerce/Book/Detail/1738/a%20russian%20american...
Book Symbolic Immortality: the Tlingit Potlatch of the Nineteenth Century. Second Edition (Revised and expanded). University of Washington Press. 2015.
[1990 Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award].
Book Memory Eternal: Tlingit Culture and Russian Orthodox Christianity through Two Centuries. University of Washington Press. 1999.
Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Washington, DC, 2014
Annual Meeting of the American Society for Ethnohistory, Nashville, TN, 2016
Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Chicago, 2013
International Conference “Going to the People: Jews and the Ethnographic Impulse.” Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, 2013
Fifth International Conference on Russian America, Mariehamn, Finland, 2012
Tlingit Clan Conferences; Sitka, Alaska, 2012; Juneau, Alaska, 2015, 2013
Annual Meeting of the American Society for Ethnohistory, Indianapolis, IN, 2014
Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, San Francisco, 2012
A Multi-Ethnic Alaska Town: Sitka as Depicted by Elbridge W. Merrill's Photographs (1890s-1920s) (book)
Mortuary Rites, Memory, and Authority/Agency: Anthropology of Death in the Early twenty-First Century. A Collection of Essays submitted for review to the Anthropoiogy of Religion series, Palgrave McMillan in August 2015.
Co-edited with Sebastien P. Boret and Susan O. Long.
Alexander A. Goldenweiser: a Rebellious Boasian Anthropologist. (An intellectual biography of one of the most brilliant yet underappreciated American anthropologists of the 1910s-1930s.
