Shannon Speed
Shannon Speed
Core Faculty
Professor
Gender Studies/Anthropology
Office: Campbell Hall 3220A
Email: sspeed@aisc.ucla.edu
Biography
Shannon Speed is a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation. She is the Paula Gunn Allen Chair and Professor of American Indian Studies, Gender Studies, and Anthropology at UCLA, where she also serves as Director of the American Indian Studies Center and Special Advisor to the Chancellor on Native American and Indigenous Affairs. Dr. Speed has worked for three decades in Mexico and the United States on issues of Indigenous rights, gender, neoliberalism, violence, migration, and activist research. Her books include the award-winning Incarcerated Stories: Indigenous Women Migrants and Violence in the Settler Capitalist State (UNC Press 2020) and the co-edited volume with Dr. Lynn Stephen, Heightened States of Injustice: Activist Research on Indigenous Women and Violence (University of Arizona Press 2021). She is currently working on a new book with her own tribal nation entitled, “Chickasaw Spring: Law and Resurgent Sovereignty in a Native Nation.” She is a recipient of the President’s Award from the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and the Chickasaw Dynamic Woman of the Year award from the Chickasaw Nation. She served as the President of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) from 2018 to 2021. Dr. Speed is active in her tribe’s language revitalization program as a learner and teacher, and serves as a board member of Comunidades Indigenas en Liderazgo (CIELO) and on the leadership circle of the Indigenous Education Now Coalition (IEN) in Los Angeles.
Education
PhD Anthropology from University of California, Davis
