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Dr. Elizabeth Rule (citizen, Chickasaw Nation) is a writer, public scholar, and advocate for Indigenous communities. She holds a Social Practice Residency at the Kennedy Center and is an assistant professor of Critical Race, Gender, and Culture Studies at American University.

Rule’s time at the Kennedy Center is being dedicated to the development of an Indigenous feminist television screenplay, Moon Time.

Rule’s research on issues in her Native American community has been featured in the Washington Post, Matter of Fact with Soledad O’Brien, the Atlantic, Newsy, and NPR. She has two forthcoming monographs. The first, Indigenous DC: Native Peoples and the Nation’s Capital (under contract, Georgetown University Press), analyzes historical and contemporary sites of Indigenous importance in Washington, D.C. Rule’s second book project, Reproducing Resistance: Gendered Violence and Indigenous Nationhood, links Native women’s reproductive justice issues and the missing and murdered Indigenous women; this work received the Julien Mezey Award for best dissertation from the Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities in 2020.

Venues for her public talks have included the United Nations Association, United States State Department, multiple U.S. Embassies, the National Gallery of Art, and more. Rule is additionally the founder of the Guide to Indigenous Lands Project, which builds mobile applications and digital maps featuring Indigenous sites on the city, state, tribal, and national levels. In 2019, she launched the Guide to Indigenous DC to highlight Indigenous influences in the nation’s capital, which received media coverage on more than 30 outlets. Rule has since developed a Guide to Indigenous Baltimore and Guide to Indigenous Maryland.

Rule’s work has received support from MIT Solve, the Ford Foundation, the Center for Black, Brown, and Queer Studies, and more. In 2021, she was recognized as an AT&T Women’s History Month Honoree, was named among the National Center for American Indian Enterprise Development’s “40 Under 40,” and received the Library Company of Philadelphia’s Innovation Award. Rule previously served as the Director of George Washington University’s AT&T Center for Indigenous Politics and Policy: Washington, D.C.’s only university-based research center dedicated to Indigenous issues. She received her PhD and MA in American Studies from Brown University, and her BA from Yale University.