Dr. Sarah A. Whitt is an enrolled citizen of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma and (as of July 1, 2026) an Associate Professor in the Department of Global and International Studies at UC Irvine, with an affiliate faculty appointment in the Department of History. Her scholarship is animated by questions about race, gender, power, and Indigenous experiences of institutionalization, with particular emphasis on Indigenous incarceration and confinement, the politics of discipline and punishment, critical settler studies, and contested relationships between Indigeneity and disability. Whitt contributes to interdisciplinary conversations across Native American and Indigenous Studies, settler colonial studies, gender and sexuality studies, disability studies, and carceral studies.
She is the author of Bad Medicine: Settler Colonialism and the Institutionalization of American Indians (Duke University Press, 2025), which examines interconnected histories of punishment, pathologization, and labor exploitation in Progressive-era institutions including the Carlisle Indian Industrial School and the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians. Drawing on archival research and oral testimonies, the book traces how settler institutions deputized white Americans as disciplinary agents while Indigenous people endured and resisted institutionalization as a tool of settler colonialism. Whitt is currently working on a second book project, Prisoners of War: An Indigenous History of Captivity, Memory, and Freedom in the United States, which reframes Indigenous incarceration as an affective and material history of captivity across U.S. history. In addition to publishing and teaching, Whitt is active in professional and public-facing collaborations, including committee and editorial board service that supports accessibility, Indigenous scholarship, and the broader historical profession.
Contact:
Select Works:
“Fugitive Acts: Tracing Indigenous Mobilities along the Carceral Continuum.” AHR “History Lab” Forum, co-edited by Maggie Blackhawk, Balraj Gill, Max Mishler, and Michael Ralph, forthcoming in the American Historical Review.
“Continuity of Spirit and the Carceral Continuum: Indigenous Women’s Experiences of Incarceration across Settler Time and Space.” American Quarterly, vol. 78 no. 2, June 2026.
“Indigenous Institutionalization in the United States.” Oxford Bibliographies in the History of Medicine, Oxford University Press, April 2025.
“Wash Away Your Sins: Indigenous and Irish Experiences in Magdalene Laundries and the Poetics of Errant Histories.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 46, no. 3 (2023).
K. Tsianina Lomawaima and Sarah Whitt. “Indigenous Boarding School Experiences.” Oxford Bibliographies in Anthropology, Oxford University Press, September 2023.
Sarah Whitt, Traci Voyles, and Susan Burch. “Settler Ableism: Indigeneity, Unsettling the Archive, and Accountability in History.” In Cripping the Archive: Disability, Power, and History. Eds. Jenifer Barclay and Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy. University of Illinois Press.
“‘An Ordinary Case of Discipline’: Deputizing White Americans and Punishing Indian Men at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, 1900-1918.” Western Historical Quarterly, December 2022.
“‘Care and Maintenance’: Indigeneity, Disability, and Settler Colonialism at the Canton Asylum for Insane Indians (1902-1934).” Disability Studies Quarterly 41, no. 4 (2021). Special Issue: Indigeneity + Disability.