History Welcomes New Faculty for Fall 25: Brianna Tafolla Rivière
The History Department is excited to announce that Brianna Tafolla Rivière will be joining our faculty as Assistant Professor of History in Fall 2025!
Brianna Tafolla Rivière is a historian of Twentieth-Century, North American Indigenous history. Her dissertation, “Reel Red Power: Indigenous Activism, Visual Sovereignty, and the Film Industry,” focuses on the effort of Native American activists to remake the representation of Indigenous Peoples and United States history in film. Through the lens of Indigenous futurism, spectacle, urban studies, and visual sovereignty, she centers Red Power activists and expands current scholarship on the Red Power movement beyond political and social spheres, highlighting how Native activists and filmmakers reconceptualized an entire industry. This work contributes to histories of Indigenous North America to show the complexities and evolving strategies of Indigenous activism in an era of mass media production.
Her second book project examines the intersections between the Red Power movement and the Chicano movement (El Movimiento). Bringing together Indigenous Studies and Chicanx Studies theory, she plans to weave together Indigenous hemispheric epistemologies. Alongside this, she also aims to continue to explore ideas of Indigenous activism, urban studies, and political agency as she examines how Native Americans and Chicanos collaborated and clashed in the era of civil rights and radical social justice.
Tafolla Rivière will be teaching courses on Indigenous history, popular culture, film studies, and more. She earned her B.A. and M.A. in History from the University of Nebraska, Omaha and a Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Davis.