#  Isaiah Lorado Wilner 

 

 



   ![IW%20Photo_0.jpg](/sites/g/files/omnuum4936/files/styles/hwp_4_5__480x600/public/IW%2520Photo_0_6.jpg?itok=688OSDBb) 

 



 





 

Isaiah Lorado Wilner is a global historian of knowledge who researches at the interstices of race, modernity, memory, and ecology. He received his PhD in History from Yale University in 2016. Wilner’s current project connects cultural and intellectual history, Indigenous studies, narrative studies, and the history of science to investigate the influence of non-state people on the state. It focuses in particular on narratives of transformation: stories of self-alteration, reciprocity, and borderless travel developed as a survival strategy by colonized people facing the vectors of epidemic pathogens and state erasure, which resulted in the critique of race. Working with the Indigenous people of British Columbia and in archives and museums from New York to Berlin, Wilner reconnects knowledge to its origins and traces its global propagation. He thus studies globalization as a narrative process of transmission and reception, which connects and transforms intellectual ecosystems. Wilner’s 2013 article “A Global Potlatch: Identifying the Indigenous Influence on Western Thought” revealed the seminal impact of the Kwakwaka’wakw intellectual George Hunt and his people on the concept of culture. His forthcoming anthology for Yale University Press, edited with Ned Blackhawk, is called Indigenous Visions: Rediscovering the World of Franz Boas.

 

 

 





 

 

- ## Discipline
    
     [Ethnic Studies](/disciplines/ethnicity-migration-rights) [History](/disciplines/history)
- ## Fellowship
    
     [Postdoctoral](/fellowship/postdoctoral)
- ## Fellowship Year
    
     [2016 - 2017](/fellowship-year/2016-2017)
- ## Role
    
     [Fellows](/role/fellow)