Doug Kiel, Ph.D.

Doug Kiel, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History and the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities at Northwestern University. He is also a faculty affiliate of Northwestern’s Center for Native American and Indigenous Research (CNAIR). Kiel is a citizen of the Oneida Nation, and received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He studies Native American history, with particular interests in the western Great Lakes region and Indigenous nation rebuilding. His publications include scholarship on the erasure of Indigenous histories in the American Midwest, the origins of racial “blood quantum” policies in Native America, and legal disputes between the Oneida Nation and the Village of Hobart, Wisconsin, a mostly non-Native municipality that is located within the boundaries of the Oneida Reservation and seeks to block the tribe from recovering land that was lost a century ago. Beyond the university, Professor Kiel has worked in numerous museums, testified as an expert witness in regard to Native American land rights, and in 2008 was as an Indigenous Fellow at the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) in Geneva, Switzerland. Kiel is also an Adjunct Curator at the Field Museum, where he currently serves on the advisory committee for a new exhibition on Native North America that will open in late 2021.