The Newberry recently welcomed Madison Bastress as the Director of the D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies. Bastress is a non-Native scholar who has considerable experience collaborating with midwestern Native nations. In this role, she will be responsible for all aspects of the center including its academic consortium, the ongoing Indigenous Chicago project, and reciprocal relationships with Native communities. Bastress recently completed her PhD in History at New York University. Her dissertation, which focused on Myaamia (Miami) ecological relationships and placemaking in the seventeenth century, was informed by her work with the Myaamia Center. For the last two years, she was a visiting scholar at the Myaamia Center, a site for collaborative research directed by the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma in partnership with Miami University (Ohio).
Additionally, Bastress is a member of the project team for the Reclaiming Stories Project, a collaborative research initiative led by the Miami and Peoria Nations. The project centers seventeenth-century minohsayaki “painted hides” histories and Peoria and Miami cultural revitalization. She also participated in Indigenous Chicago planning meetings on behalf of the Peoria Tribe’s Cultural Office. Previously, she took part in catalog research and GIS projects at the Leventhal Map and Education Center at the Boston Public Library.
Bastress earned her BA at Washington & Jefferson College and her MA at Villanova University.