David Myer Temin

Assistant Professor of Political Science

Faculty in Native American Studies

Welcome to my website. I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and administrative faculty in the Native American Studies program at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. I am a political theorist whose research and teaching spans American political thought, Native American studies and politics, comparative and global political thought, and postcolonial and critical race studies. My research explores how the diverse strands of anticolonial thought help to reconsider central dilemmas of social and environmental justice in empire’s wake, as well as refashioning political concepts such as sovereignty and land. In this vein, I am the author of Remapping Sovereignty: Decolonization and Self-Determination in North American Indigenous Political Thought (2023, University of Chicago Press), which bridges political-intellectual history and conceptual analysis to show how key 20th-century Indigenous intellectuals and activists in lands today claimed by Canada and the United States reshaped the philosophical substance and normative goals of “decolonization.” The book traces how these conceptual moves and practical efforts to enact decolonization hinged on heavily debated projects of disentangling self-determination from the sovereign-state, the restitution of dispossessed land, autonomy and safety for Indigenous women, and care-based duties of ecological stewardship. I have also published research in venues such as Political TheoryPerspectives on Politics, American Political Science Review, Political Research Quarterly, and European Journal of Political Theory.

You can view my academia.edu website here and my CV here for a more complete list of publications, teaching, and other professional activities. I also occasionally tweet @david_temin and I’m testing out the decentralized mastodon @davidtemin@mastodon.social.