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

Activities and Interests

Professor Allen’s work 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) and Trans-Indigenous: Methodologies for Global Native Literary Studies (U of Minnesota P, 2012), he is 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 is currently completing a new book manuscript with the working title Earthworks Rising: Mound Building in Native Art, Literature, and Performance.  He served as editor for the journal SAIL: 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).  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.