ELSPETH IRALU (Angami Naga) is an Indigenous scholar working at the intersection of Indigenous studies, cultural studies, and geography. She is a 2022-2023 postdoctoral Mellon Fellow at Stanford University in the Stanford Humanities Center and the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. In 2023, she will join the University of New Mexico Department of Community and Regional Planning as an Assistant Professor of Indigenous Planning.

Iralu’s current work examines the aerial perspective as a technology of colonial territoriality. In this project, she considers the volume of Indigenous territories above, below, and on the surface of the earth to better understand the volumetric sovereignty of Indigenous nations and challenge new modes of colonial spatial surveillance and control. She is a contributing editor to Species in Peril, an international public engagement project about the biodiversity crisis. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on Indigenous geographies, research methods, visual culture, and environmental and social justice.

Iralu received her Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of New Mexico in 2022. She holds an MPH in community health promotion with a focus on critical development studies and social change from the University of Minnesota, an MA in secondary teaching from Western New Mexico University, and a BS in geology from Sewanee: The University of the South.

Iralu’s work has been generously supported by the Russell J. and Dorothy S. Bilinski Foundation, the New Mexico Higher Education Department, the Naga American Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change, and the Global Programs and Strategy Alliance at the University of Minnesota.