Sonja Dobroski

I am a sociocultural anthropologist with expertise in settler colonial theory, material culture, and Native American studies. I am interested in how material culture functions in settler colonial societies, paying specific attention to how power is maintained via materiality. My research interlinks historical, archaeological, and anthropological methods and combines oral history, ethnography, museum, and archival research.

I recevied my PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of St Andrews. Prior to this I received my first master's degree in American Indian Studies from the University of California Los Angeles. I received my second master's degree in Archaeology from the University of Oxford. My B.A. is in Anthropology and Native American Studies from the University of Montana-Missoula. 

My forthcoming book, Feathered Possession: The war bonnet and the evolution of U.S. settler culture, traces the history of U.S. settler appropriation of Indigenous feathered headdresses. Written as a series of historical vignettes woven with ethnographic data the book spans a period of 400 years, framing the appropriation of headdresses within a reading of settler semiotics and a detailed chronology of U.S. iconography. The book traverses historic battles fought by the Cheyenne warrior Hay-o-Wei and the western showman Buffalo Bill, the secret rituals of a distinctly American fraternal order, and the decisions that Western artists make when creating their paintings, among other themes. The conclusion draws together observations made throughout the book connecting disparate events of appropriation by framing them as a form of settler colonial culture-making. 

I am an international research collaborator on the Kone Foundation funded project, Omia, lainata, varastaa? Alkuperäiskansakulttuurien käyttö Suomessa läpi 1900-luvun (Own, Borrow, Steal?: The Appropriation of Indigenous cultures in Finland throughout the 20th Century). As part of this project I am co-editing an upcoming volume that brings together original historical and interdisciplinary research on cultural appropriation across different regions and eras. The collection aims to deepen understandings of cultural appropriation by highlighting its historical dynamics and the motivations behind cultural borrowing.

Across my research projects, I work extensively with collections and provenance research. Drawing on this expertise, I serve as a Research Fellow at the Manchester Museum, where I am researching the provenance of the museum’s holdings of the Welcomme Collection, focusing on reconstructing object histories and their contexts of acquisition.

settler colonial theory, material culture, nationalism, semiotics & structuralism, myth of the American west, Native American studies, Indigenous futurisms, museums & heritage, social history & ethnography of the Western United States, landscapes, phenomenology, historicity, object ID and analysis, collections and provenance research. 

I am the Teaching & Learning Lead for the Department of Social Anthropology

My teaching reflects my interdisciplinary background by employing a mixed methodological and theoretical approach. In my teaching, in addition to anthropology, I often draw on pedagogies and literatures from history, archaeology, and Native American and Indigenous studies. 

I regularly teach the following courses: 

Regional Studies of Culture: Native North America

Anthropological Theory: Dark Anthropology 

Key Ideas in Social Anthropology 

Undergraduate Dissertation Seminar