Biography
Jen Rose Smith is a dAXunhyuu/Eyak geographer interested in the intersections of coloniality, race, and indigeneity as read through aesthetic and literary contributions, archival evidences, and experiential embodied knowledges especially in Alaska and the Arctic more broadly. She teaches courses in Indigenous literature and environmental humanities, Indigenous geographies, and Indigenous studies methods. She received her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in Comparative Ethnic Studies, her Master's Degree from the same department, and holds a BA in English Literature and the Environment from the University of Alaska, Southeast.
Her first book Ice Geographies: The Colonial Politics of Race and Indigeneity in the Arctic released by Duke University Press in 2025 is available here. The book places ice and glaciers at the center to analyze historical and ongoing racial and colonial formations as well as Indigenous theorizing and creative knowledge production. Ice Geographies was a recipient of the Duke University Press First Book Fund, a co-winner of the On the Brinck award presented by the University of New Mexico School of Architecture and Planning, and a winner of the 2026 Cultural and Political Ecology Specialty Group (CAPE) Outstanding Book Award. Ice Geographies was supported by fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the University of California Presidential Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, and the Ford Fellowship Foundation. Smith’s academic articles have been published in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, and The Geographical Journal.
Her creative writing and essays take up questions of Indigenous community politics, space-making, and land relations and have been published in Inuit Art Quarterly, The Funambulist, Vogue Magazine, The Avery Review, and edited collections such as Circumpolar Connections: Creative Indigenous Geographies of the Arctic, Towards Home: Inuit and Sámi Placemaking, Land With(in)out, and Indigenous Political Ecologies (forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press 2027). Her community work is invested in dAXunhyuuga' (Eyak language) revitalization and community led mapping initiatives.
Smith's next project, Indigenous Weather: Atmospheric Expertise in Science and Story is supported by the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), and the Simpson Center for the Humanities and the Royalty Research Fund at the University of Washington. The book will analyze Indigenous creative knowledge production about weather in Alaska and the Canadian Arctic made by Native women, and is animated by the following questions. As climates rapidly change the world over, in what ways are Indigenous conceptualizations of weather and atmospheric events accounted for, leading the way, extracted, or overlooked? How are Indigenous forms of weather expertise rendered through creative knowledge production, and how is “scientific knowledge” also produced through memoir, poetry, and art practice? This project is attended by the building of a Theme Issue for Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space with Dr. Elspeth Iralu called "Indigenous Atmospheres."