Amanda Daniela Cortez (she/her) is a postdoctoral research association at the Center forIndigenous Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She received her BA inanthropology from the University of Washington and continued on to earn her MA and PhDin anthropology from the University of Notre Dame. After completing her doctorate, she was a postdoctoral teaching scholar at the University of Notre Dame and a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Connecticut. Before coming to UIUC, she was fulltime faculty at Clatsop Community College in Astoria, Oregon, where she taught anthropology, sociology, and women’s and gender studies.

Trained as a cultural anthropologist, Amanda’s work sits at the intersection of Indigenous studies, animal studies, and anthropology to address questions of Indigenous sovereignty and human-other animal relationships. Her current book project is an ethnography of the politics of Indigeneity, gender, and multispecies relating in Cusco, Peru’s photography tourism industry. The book centers the lives of Quechua women and animals as they confront and refuse state-sanctioned violence while working in cultural tourism. Her previous work focused on the ethics of ancient DNA research with Indigenous Ancestors. At the Center for Indigenous Science, she is developing an ethnography of community-based molecular anthropology to better understand and promote research that centers Indigenous sovereignty. Amanda’s research has been published in the Journal for Social Archaeology, Human Genetics and Genomics Advances, and Anthropology News.