Philip J. Deloria is the Leverett Saltonstall Professor of History at Harvard University, where he chairs the Committee on Degrees in History and Literature. His research and teaching focus on the social, cultural, and political histories of relations among American Indian peoples and the United States, as well as the comparative histories of Indigenous peoples in a global context. He is the author of several books, including Playing Indian, Indians in Unexpected Places, American Studies: A User’s Guide, with Alexander Olson, and Becoming Mary Sully: Toward an American Indian Abstract, and is co-editor of The Blackwell Companion to American Indian History (with Neal Salisbury) and C.G. Jung and the Sioux Traditions by Vine Deloria, Jr. (with Jerome Bernstein). 

Deloria received the Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University in 1994, taught at the University of Colorado, and then, from 2001 to 2017, at the University of Michigan, before joining the faculty at Harvard in January 2018. Deloria served for over a decade as a trustee of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian, where for many years he chaired the Repatriation Committee. He continues to work toward the return of Native American ancestors and cultural patrimony and for the flourishing of Indigenous life. Deloria has served as President of the American Studies Association and the Organization of American Historians, and will begin serving as President of the Society of American Historians in May 2023. He is an elected member of the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.