Historian and Author
Jane Ushiyama Dinwoodie
Dr Jane Ushiyama Dinwoodie is an award-winning historian and author. She received her doctorate in American history from Oxford University and her BA and MPhil from Cambridge University. She is currently completing work on her first book, "We Remain: Indian Non-Removal in the Nineteenth-century American South," which is forthcoming with Yale University Press.
Throughout her career, she has held a range of research and teaching positions including University Lecturer in Nineteenth-century American History at University College London, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge University, and Advisory Council Dissertation Fellow at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, University of Pennsylvania. Her work has been published in various places, including the Journal of American History, and has won awards from the Organization of American Historians (including the 2022 Binkley-Stephenson Prize for the best article in the JAH), the American Society of Ethnohistory, and Nineteenth-Century Studies Association.
Her research has been generously supported by a variety of associations, including the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, the Royal Historical Society, and the Rothermere American Institute at Oxford University.
Work & Publications
Jane is currently at work on her first book, "We Remain: Indian Non-Removal in the Nineteenth-century American South," which is forthcoming with Yale University Press.
On May 28, 1830, Andrew Jackson passed the Indian Removal act. In the following years, federal officials oversaw the coerced migration of approximately 100,000 Indigenous Americans from their Eastern homelands to lands west of the Mississippi River. Two hundred years later, Indian removal remains one of the most important events of the American past. In survey courses, removal often serves as a pivot: as Native Nations move westwards, master narratives shift from stories of an older Indigenous continent to tales of an American East. This is especially true in histories of the American South, where removal facilitates a tragic but momentous transition to Cotton Kingdom and Confederacy.
We Remain tells a different story. From the Great Smokies across to the Atlantic seaboard and down to the Gulf of Mexico, thousands of Indigenous Southerners fought to stay in their homelands. Ranging across the South and its polities, We Remain reconceptualizes non-removal as a massive, cross-regional phenomenon that affected not only Indigenous Southerners, but also American officials, policymakers, and settlers, as well as wider dynamics of American state power and settler colonial expansion. By seizing a range of strategies – often in ways that American policymakers could not see and understand – thousands of Indigenous Southerners successfully resisted American attempts to remove them and sustained an alternative geography of Indigenous survivance that endures to this day.
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Jane Dinwoodie, “Evading Indian Removal in the American South,” Journal of American History, Volume 108, Issue 1 (June 2021), 17-41.
Winner: Organization of American Historians 2022 Binkley-Stephenson Award (for the best article published in the JAH in the preceding calendar year).
Honorable Mention: 2023 Nineteenth-Century Studies Association Emerging Scholars Award.
Jane Dinwoodie, “The Long War: Sustaining Indigenous Communities and Contesting Sovereignties in the Civil War South” in Frank Towers and Jewel Spangler (eds.), Remaking North American Sovereignty: State Transformation in the 1860s (New York: Fordham University Press, 2020).
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