Bruno Seraphin

Assistant Professor

Anthropology

Education

Ph.D., 2023, Cornell University

About

My research focuses on environmental and climate justice movements in the U.S. West, imperialism and militarism, and film methodologies. My book-in-progress examines the politics of wildfire and prescribed burning in Karuk aboriginal territory in the unsettled colonial present. A settler scholar originally from occupied Nipmuc land in eastern Massachusetts, I am an award-winning filmmaker with a BFA in film and television from New York University, an MA in folklore from the University of Oregon, and a PhD in anthropology from Cornell University. My research has been supported by organizations such as the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Center for Engaged Scholarship, and Cornell University’s Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies.

Research Interests

(On leave until fall 2026)

Sociocultural anthropology, environmental anthropology, visual and multimodal anthropology, critical climate studies, anti-colonial social movements, U.S. imperialism and militarism, collaborative filmmaking, wildfire, prescribed burning, California, U.S. northwest

Affiliations

2025-2026 Mellon Foundation Native American Scholars Initiative Postdoctoral Fellow, American Philosophical Society Core Faculty, Native American and Indigenous Studies & American Studies, University of Connecticut

Teaching

Publications

Selected writing

Seraphin, Bruno. “’But Who Were You In It?’: Wildtending and the Human.” Hunter Gatherer Research. (Forthcoming)“Indigenous Fire Futures: Anti-colonial Approaches to Shifting California’s Wildfire Relations.” Co-authored with Deniss Martinez, Peter Nelson, Tony Marks-Block, and Kirsten Vinyeta. Environment and Society: Advances in Research.

2023 “Settler Colonial Counterinsurgency: Indigenous Resistance and the More-than-state Policing of #NoDAPL,” Security Dialogue. https://doi-org.proxy.library.cornell.edu/10.1177/09670106231159207

2022 “Against the Eco-Fascist Creep ” (webzine), authored by the Anti-Creep Climate Collective.

2020 “Wildtending, Settler Colonialism, and Ecocultural Identities in Environmental Futures,” in The Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity.

Selected book chapters

Seraphin, Bruno and April Anson. “Supremacists Gone Native.” In The Politics of the Multiracial Right, Daniel HoSang and Joseph Lowndes, ed.s, NYU Press. (Forthcoming) Seraphin, Bruno.

“Wildtending, settler colonialism, and ecocultural identities in environmental futures.” In Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity, pp. 403-415. Routledge, 2020.

Public & Engaged Scholarship

2022. “Against the Eco-Fascist Creep” (webzine), co-authored as the Anti-Creep Climate Initiative.

Selected films

2024. “Shifting The Fire Paradigm in Karuk Aboriginal Territory – 2023 SRF Lightning Complex,” with the Karuk Tribe.

2023. “Pa’asik’tavaansas kuniktáamvunatih: The Women They Are Carrying Fire,” with the Karuk Women’s Prescribed Fire Training Exchange.

2022 “Hupa Fire: Traditional and Cultural Fire Management,” videographer and editor, dir. Greg Moon, with the Hoopa Valley Tribe Fire Department.

2022 “Talking Roads: Transportation and Climate Adaptation in Karuk Country,” co-producer, co-videographer, editor, with the Karuk Tribe.

2021 “Carrying the Torch: Klamath River TREX 2020,” co-producer and principal filmmaker, with Klamath TREX and the Karuk Tribe.

2019 “pananu’thívthaaneen xúus nu’êethtiheesh: We’re Caring For Our World,” co-producer, co-videographer, co-editor, with the Karuk Tribe.

Awards

• 2022-2023 Dissertation Fellowship, Center for Engaged Scholarship
• 2021 Marion and Frank Long Graduate Research Fellowship, Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, Einaudi Center for International Studies, Cornell University
• 2020-2021 Dissertation Fieldwork Grant, The Wenner-Gren Foundation