Short BioEllen Cushman is Dean's Professor of Civic Sustainability and Professor of English at Northeastern University and a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. Her work explores how people use literacy and language to endure and create change.
Full Bio
I have been a scholar of literacy, race, and culture for two decades and a scholar of Cherokee literacies and empire for fifteen of those years. My research explores the ways individuals and communities use reading and writing to endure and create change. My work is premised on Cherokee ethics of reciprocity, civic responsibility and perseverance: I am a Cherokee Nation citizen and have served as a Cherokee Nation Sequoyah Commissioner.
My current research takes up Cherokee philosophies of collective change and reevaluates the commitment to civic-mindedness at the heart of American literary and rhetorical studies. Cherokees Writing Resilience: Everyday Literacies of Collective Action (working title) will be the first monograph to treat the common writings of Cherokee people as evidence of a lived ethic of individual perseverance and a people's collective resilience. I'm grateful to the National Endowment for the Humanities for supporting this book project with a fellowship. Along with this book project, I am lead PI of a team developing a digital archive to support indigenous language learning through the translation of Cherokee language manuscripts housed in museums and archives around the country. The Digital Archive of Indigenous Languages Persistence (DAILP). Phase 1 of this project was supported with seed grants from Institute for Museums and Library Services: Sparks! Ignition Grant, the Henry Luce Foundation: Indigenous knowledge initiative grant, and a Northeastern University Tier 1 grant. In phase 2 of the DAILP Project, the DAILP team received a National Archives: National Historical Preservation and Records Commission (NHPRC) award of $160,000 to expand the initial corpus of translated texts into a fully-fledged digital edition, titled: Cherokees Writing the Keetoowah Way. The team was also awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities: Digital Humanities Advancement Grant level II, for $99,957 for two years to develop the translation environment for DAILP. We remain especially grateful for the generous support received from the Henry K. Luce Foundation of $250,000 to evaluate the impact of DAILP and expand the number of Cherokee community members who produce audio files and translations. Now in its third phase, DAILP has developed a prototype of its translation software and vetted it with tribal community members. The DAILP reading and writing interface make possible the collective work of translating indigenous language media, which feed the back-end lexical data infrastructure to produce digital edited collections. As a post custodial digital archive, DAILP’s twofold goal is to sustain indigenous language practices (e.g. reading, writing, speaking, and listening) and to enhance documentation of indigenous languages. Working with the UKBCI translation team, DAILP is currently producing a second digital edited collection, The Willie Jumper Stories, a project supported by the National Archives with $125,000 grant. We received a Level III NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant for $500,000 that was terminated in March 2026. With generous support from the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the DAILP team continues to work on scaling and refining the DAILP translation environment. By the end of Phase 3, between 2028-2029, the DAILP team will have refined the current DAILP Translation Interface (DAILP TI) with improved activity features and user profiles as well as enabled administrative roles and expanded editor roles. We will continue to deepen our engagement with members of the Anishinaabe and Cherokee communities concerning the design and collaborative ergonomics of these enhanced features as well as identify and enable other features desired by Anishinaabe community members. Finally, we will continue testing the supporting documentation and workflows to ensure smooth handoff of the DAILP TI and all of its code to allow other tribal communities to stand up their own DAILP sites. Please check out our GitHub site to learn more about our code, our site, and our workflows. Academic Origin Story My first book, The Struggle and the Tools (SUNY 1998), drew on ethnographic fieldwork in an inner city community to demonstrate the institutional reading and writing practices of community members. The research leading to this book earned the 1997 National Council of Teachers of English CCCC James Berlin Outstanding Dissertation of the Year Award and the 1997 Richard Braddock Award. My second book, The Cherokee Syllabary: Writing the People's Perseverance (University of Oklahoma Press, 2012), traced the instrumental, cultural and historical legacy of the Cherokee syllabary. With both my sole-authored books, my goal has been to provide evidence of the commonplace reading and writing practices that make for individual agency and community strength particularly during times of crisis. I have also published three co-edited collections: Pluriversal Literacies: Tools for Perseverance and Livable Futures, with Romeo Garcia and Damián Baca (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024); Landmark Essays on Rhetorics of Difference, with Damián Baca and Jonathan Osborne (Routledge 2019) and Literacies: A Critical Sourcebook, 2nd edition, with Christina Haas and Mike Rose (Macmillan 2020). Mary Juzwik and I served as Co-Editors of Research in the Teaching of English, the premier research journal of the National Council of Teachers of English, from 2012-2017. I have published over 70 articles, book chapters, and essays — many of them co-authored with students and early career scholars. In 2017, I received the Distinguished Engaged Scholar Award from the Conference on Community Writing. I was elected Chair of the Coalition for Community Writing (2019-2021) by the Coalition for Community Writing Advisory Board. In 2025, I was honored by Northeastern University with the Excellence in Research and Creative Activity Award. Between 2016 and 2021, I served as Associate Dean of Academic Affairs, Diversity and Inclusion in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities at Northeastern University. In this position, I facilitated the hiring, retention, mentoring, and promotion of colleagues. I am Dean's Professor of Civic Sustainability and Professor of English in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities at Northeastern University. I earned my PhD in Rhetoric and Communication from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1996. |
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