Christen Mucher

Christen Mucher is Associate Professor of American Studies at Smith College in Massachusetts. She specializes in early American studies, Native and Indigenous studies, and museum and archival studies, with a focus on nationalist mythmaking, Indigenous dispossession, and deep time narratives. Mucher is affiliated with the Five College Certificate Program in Native American and Indigenous Studies and the Archives and Museums concentrations at Smith. She also serves as director of the Smith College Internship Program at the Smithsonian Institution.

Her educational background includes a Ph.D. and M.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and an A.B. from Mount Holyoke College.

Christen Mucher’s research centers on historiography, archival theory, and the construction of early American history, especially how archaeology and antiquarianism have shaped national myths in the U.S. and Mexico. She explores Indigenous histories of the Ohio and Mexico valleys, museum collections in Haiti, the U.S., Mexico, and France, and the intersections of science, literature, and empire. Her work critically engages with settler colonialism, the erasure of Indigenous presence, and alternative temporalities beyond colonial historical frameworks.

Her recent publications reveal a consistent engagement with prehistory, deep time, and decolonial methodologies. Themes include the rhetoric of archaeological value, the mythologizing of the American Revolution, and the translation of foundational Haitian literary works. Her scholarship bridges literary criticism, cultural history, and transnational American studies.

• Before American History: Nationalist Mythmaking and Indigenous Dispossession (2022)
• Decolonizing “Prehistory”: Deep Time and Indigenous Knowledges in North America (2021, co-edited)
• “Collecting Native America: John Lloyd Stephens and the Rhetoric of Archaeological Value” (2018)
• Co-translation of Stella, the first Haitian novel (2015)

Mucher’s research has been generously supported by the American Antiquarian Society, the Newberry Library, the New-York Historical Society, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She is actively involved in mentoring and institutional programs, including advising students and leading internship initiatives. Currently on sabbatical in Fall 2024, she is developing a new project on 19th-century U.S. agricultural policy and the biological sciences through the lens of settler colonialism. She also explores ancient landscapes of the eastern U.S. and non-human conceptions of time, such as geological and ecological temporalities, as a method to challenge colonial historical conventions.