Biography
Associate Vice Provost, Office for Academic Personnel and Faculty
In his role as Associate Vice Provost, Professor Allen oversees the area of Inclusive Excellence within the Office for Academic Personnel and Faculty, which promotes the hiring, retention, and success of a diverse and inclusive faculty at the University of Washington. He works closely with the Office of Minority Affairs and Diversity (OMA&D) to implement recruitment and retention goals articulated in the university-wide Diversity Blueprint and to support provisions of the Faculty Code that recognize excellence in research, teaching, and service that promotes diversity and equity.
Scholarly Areas of Specialization
Trans-Indigenous literary studies; Native American, Maori, and Oceanic literatures and cultures; postcolonial literatures and theory; frontier studies and US western literature
Scholarly Activities and Interests
Professor Allen’s scholarship centers around studies of contemporary Native American and global Indigenous literatures, other expressive arts, and activism. Author of the books Blood Narrative: Indigenous Identity in American Indian and Maori Literary and Activist Texts (Duke UP, 2002), Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies (U of Minnesota P, 2012), and Earthworks Rising: Mound Building in Native Literature and Arts (U of Minnesota P, 2022), he is also co-editor, with Beth Piatote, of The Society of American Indians and Its Legacies (a special combined issue of the journals Studies in American Indian Literatures and American Indian Quarterly, 2013). He served as editor for the journal Studies in American Indian Literatures between 2012 and 2017, and he served as the 2013-2014 President of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA). At the UW, he helped found the Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies (CAIIS) and served as one of its inaugural co-directors in 2018-2021. In addition to his primary work on Indigenous self-representation, Professor Allen has a strong secondary interest in US frontier literature and the popular western, and he has written extensively on the Lone Ranger and Tonto.