Drop-in hours:

• Tuesday and Thursday, 11:00am - 12:30pm and by appointment

Stephen Warren is a community-engaged scholar who has built close, working relationships with the descendants of Native nations (Shawnee, Miami, Potawatomi) who survived being deported from the Midwest. His classes emphasize the historic background of contemporary problems. Students learn more about historical methods and the detective work that enables historians to make compelling arguments about past worlds. His research areas include:

• Native American histories and cultures
• Ethnohistorical methods
• Nineteenth century U.S. history
• Community-engaged scholarship

Warren’s forthcoming book, Red Codes and Removals: Myaamia Survivance in Nineteenth-Century America (Oklahoma, 2027) explores the Myaamia experience of the long nineteenth century to examine how one Native American community withstood deportation, dispossession, and appropriation. The Myaamia people rebuilt their lives in Indiana, Kansas, and ultimately Oklahoma, despite legal regimes meant to dispossess them of their lands. Settler narratives of the Midwest often ask us to ignore both the institutionalization of white supremacy and the ongoing diversity of a region long thought of as rural, homogenous, and white. Red Codes and Removals counteracts these trends by including the experiences of today’s citizens of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma. Together with the descendants of settlers, tribal citizens have returned to their ancestral lands to craft a more inclusive, useable past. 

In 2022, (with Ben Barnes) Warren co-edited Replanting Cultures: Community-Engaged Scholarship in Indian Country (SUNY Press), which offers models of collaborative scholarship in the United States and Canada. In 2017, Warren edited The Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma: Resilience through Adversity (University of Oklahoma Press). This book was the product of a three year, tribally directed project funded by the Administration for Native Americans. More recently, Warren has worked as an expert witness for tribal nations from the Midwest. 

Warren’s second book, The Worlds the Shawnees Made: Migration and Violence in Early America (The University of North Carolina Press, 2014), stitches together archaeology, history, and ethnography to show how Shawnees made a life for themselves at the crossroads of empires and competing tribes, embracing mobility and often moving willingly toward violent borderlands. Through migration, they and their neighbors adapted to disease, warfare, and dislocation by interacting with colonizers as slavers, mercenaries, guides, and traders. These adaptations enabled them to preserve their cultural identity and resist coalescence, even as Shawnees became known as “the greatest travelers in America.”

His first book, The Shawnees and Their Neighbors, 1795-1870 (The University of Illinois Press, 2005), Warren uses Shawnee history to explore how Native peoples adopted national governments modeled after the United States. These new, tribal nations occupied unstable ground among their people, and their citizens often voted with their feet and established new governments rather than abide by the “imagined communities” of the removal era.

His research has been supported by numerous fellowships and grants, including a Mellon Sabbatical Fellowship (2010-2011), a Gilder-Lehrman Short-Term Residential Fellowship from the John D. Rockefeller Library at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation (2010), and a Lester J. Cappon Fellowship in Documentary Editing from the Newberry Library (2014). In 2009, Warren was a consultant and commentator on the WGBH/American Experience documentary, Tecumseh’s Vision.

Stephen Warren CV

Teaching

• HIST:1262: American History 1877-Present
• NAIS:1049: Introduction to Native American and Indigenous Studies
• NAIS:2290: Native American Foodways
• HIST:2292: Native American Law & Policy: A History
• HIST:3249: History of Iowa and the Midwest
• HIST:6140: Engaged Scholarship in the Humanities

Awards and service

• July 2026-Present: D.E.O/Chair, History department, University of Iowa 
• 2025-2028: Faculty Senate Officer
• October 2025: President Elect, American Society for Ethnohistory
• Spring 2024: Distinguished Achievement in Publicly Engaged Research, Office of the Vice President for Research, University of Iowa.
• 2021-2025: Program Coordinator: Native American & Indigenous Studies
• 2019-2022: D.E.O./Chair: American Studies, University of Iowa

Publications

Books

• Replanting Cultures: Community-Engaged Scholarship in Indian Country (2022)
• The Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma: Resilience through Adversity (2017) edited and introduced.
• The Worlds the Shawnees Made: Migration and Violence in Early America (2015)
• The Shawnees and Their Neighbors, 1795-1870 (2009)

Articles

• "Red Codes and Removal: Racial Exclusion and Indigenous Persistence in the Midwest." The American Indian Quarterly 48:2 (2024): 165-194
• Salvaging the Salvage Anthropologists: Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin, Carl Voegelin, and the Future of Ethnohistory, Ethnohistory 65.2 (2018): 189–214
• "Tecumseh and the Shawnee Resistance Movement" (2016)
• "Reconsidering Coalescence: Yuchi and Shawnee Survival Strategies in the Colonial Southeast” in Jason Baird Jackson, ed., One of the Other Nations: Yuchi Indian Histories before the Removal Era
• “‘To Show the Public That We Were Good Indians’”: Origins and Meanings of the Meskwaki Powwow,”
• “Service-Learning and the Historian’s Task”