Morgan L. Ridgway’s research moves between Indigenous studies, creative writing, performance studies, queer and feminist theories, and environmental studies.

Broadly, Dr. Ridgway is interested in Indigenous cultural production as an avenue for narrating seemingly impossible worlds, in the wake of the once again, always condition of settler colonial violence. The literary, performance, and visual worlds of indigeneity bolster critical critiques of the multicultural settler state by bringing into the present the kinds of Indigenous people who the state deems impossible or inconvenient. Their work moves toward an Indigenous cultural critique that is grounded in women of color and Indigenous feminisms, queer studies, and the biosocial foundations of settler colonial violence that disassembles Indigenous life. In looking toward poetry, creative writing, and archival debris, Dr. Ridgway develops a pliable language to broaden the terrain of Indigenous antagonisms against the state and reflect an investment in the practices and productions of Indigenous people who are at once material and phantasmal. In doing so they think through the conditions of possibility for Indigenous life that spill past archives and texts in order to twist time, history, and hope into the quotidian and ephemeral structures necessary for freedom.

Their book-length project explores multitribal social and political life in late 20th century Philadelphia to examine the ways Indigenous peoples in diaspora reach toward, collaborate with, and build relations with one another. This project offers a narrative of the ephemeral imaginings of Native peoples in Philadelphia that confronted the city’s multicultural and colonial logics. In embracing the seemingly impossible intimacies between one another, Native peoples enacted alternative futures both through writing and their bodies. This project reads various debris left behind by these ephemeral moments that form a landscape of inter-Indigenous relations and works to develop a language for the conditions of Indigenous life. This project reflects on the creative (literal and metaphorical) political strategies used by Indigenous peoples to re-articulate intellectual, political, and embodied sovereignties and responsibilities that reflect another way of being in Lenape territory.

In addition to their academic projects, Dr. Ridgway is a multi-disciplinary artist. They are currently working on poetry collection that explores the fractures and desires generated by colonial violence and a hybrid memoir and essay collection on Black-Native life.