Tarren Andrews

Assistant Professor of Ethnicity, Race, and Migration

Tarren Andrews is Assistant Professor in Ethnicity, Race, and Migration. She received her Ph.D. in English from the University of Colorado, Boulder. She has graduate certificates in Native American and Indigenous Studies; Culture, Language, and Social Practice; and College Teaching. Her scholarship employs critical Indigenous studies to re-evaluate and re-narrativize stories of the early medieval North Atlantic (pre-1100). Her forthcoming book takes a transtemporal approach to law and literature, re-examining legal and literary artifacts from the early medieval North Atlantic—like the Domesday Book (England, ca. 1085), the Treaty of Alfred and Guthrum (England, ca. 878), and the Old English poem The Wife’s Lament (ca. 10^th century)—alongside resonant documents and stories from Turtle Island (North America) including the Dawes Act of 1887, the Hellgate Treaty of 1859, and the Canadian Indian Act of 1876. This work seeks to find origins of Anglophone settler colonial logics as they are manifested in U.S. and Canadian settler law to better understand how we might imagine anticolonial futures. She has an essay forthcoming in Exemplaria comparing medieval settler and Indigenous approaches to slipstream sci-fi writing. Titled “Harold and Custer on the Slipstream,” this essay argues for the inherent hope offered by Indigenous storytelling. In addition to these projects, Dr. Andrews is also passionate about language revitalization and translation. She contributed the opening lines (ln. 1-12) in the 2021 translation of Beowulf by All. The citation for this “reservation translation” includes the Flathead Indian Reservation where Tarren grew up, which she credited as a co-author to honor the relationship between land and language. Dr. Andrews is the assistant medieval editor for The Sundial, a public-facing publication venue hosted by the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. She has taught at the University of Montana, Université Jean Jaures – Toulouse II, Salish Kootenai College, and the University of Colorado, Boulder.