research overview
- Jen Shannon is Curator & Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Colorado; she is currently on leave to be a Supervisory Curator at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. Jen is a collaborative and public anthropologist who is committed to facilitating and disseminating more diverse and inclusive understandings of the history and contemporary lives of Indigenous peoples through collaborative research methodologies. Her research involves connecting Native Nations to museum collections through repatriation consultations, co-directed research projects, digitizing tangible and intangible heritage, the development of online access to collections, and oral history projects. She has worked with diverse Indigenous peoples, from Chicago to Nunavut to Taiwan; most recently with the Mandan Hidatsa Arikara Nation. She was a consultant to the National Museum of the American Indian for five years, a co-host of SAPIENS: A Podcast for Everything Human for three seasons, author of Our Lives: Collaboration, Native Voice, and the Making of the National Museum of the American Indian (2014), and is a co-producer of NAGRA Comics.