Eve Eure

I am excited to join a community—across the Literature Department, Design Lab, Indigenous Futures Institute, and the Black Studies Project—that values interdisciplinary scholarship and creative experimentation. As a scholar working across Black studies and Native and Indigenous studies, I am energized by the possibility of bringing these fields into conversation with design and technology, and with colleagues, students, and community partners who are already reimagining the humanities in collaborative ways at the UC.

What drew you to your field? Why should students consider studying the arts and humanities?

I was drawn to Black studies and Native and Indigenous studies because of how they critically examine histories of slavery, dispossession, migration and settler colonialism. These inquiries open more nuanced and complex understandings of kinship relations and solidarities between Black, Afro-Native and Native and Indigenous peoples. My research extends this work by tracing how literature, law and cultural production register both the ruptures and the possibilities of kinship forged across these histories.

The arts and humanities invite students to think deeply and expansively about how history, culture and social relations shape our lives. Within Black studies and Native and Indigenous studies, students engage living histories of political struggle, creativity and survivance that illuminate connections across communities and geographies. Studying these fields equips students with the tools to question assumptions, analyze structures of power and imagine more just futures—resources urgently needed in the present. Just as importantly, the arts and humanities cultivate creativity and critical insight—skills vital not only for scholarship but also for building meaningful relationships and engaging the world with care and ethical responsibility.

What research or creative project are you working on currently?

 I am currently working on three projects: a scholarly book, a hybrid-genre family narrative and an art project.

My book, tentatively titled “The Grammar of Kinship: Black and Native Intimacies in the 19th Century,” traces relations among Afro-Native, Black, and Native and Indigenous communities in the U.S. that were often obscured or erased within settler frameworks of governance. Through the lens of kinship and intimacy, I explore both the ties that joined these communities and the narratives of non-relation that sought to efface them.

Because kinship and intimacy open a space to analyze experiments in alternative forms of belonging and relationship, they also reveal efforts to imagine different futures within and against the legal and social enclosures of 19th century settler governance. Ultimately, the book aims to create a new analytical map for re-describing a literary history of Black and Native and Indigenous writing that brings these lived practices of relation into view.

Alongside this work, I am developing a hybrid family narrative that moves between English and German, blending genres to trace the entanglements of history, memory and migration. I am also working on an art-based narrative essay, “From Louisiana to Guatemala: The Migration of Southdown Plantation’s Last Operational Sugar Mill,” which follows the afterlife of Southdown Plantation’s final mill—from its dismantling in Louisiana to its reassembly in Guatemala, where it remains in use today.

What’s your favorite class to teach and why?

My favorite course to teach is “"Black and Indigenous Placemaking.” In it, students think critically about race, place and belonging as they relate to Black, Afro-Native and Native and Indigenous communities, exploring how these histories continue to shape the present and open pathways for new forms of community and connection.

What is something about yourself that is not typically included in your bio?

I love vacationing off-season in cold coastal towns, when only a handful of shops are open, the wind tugs at everything and snow drifts onto the beach. In those moments, with my family, my dog and the non-human life around us, it feels like a complete existence.

Eve Eure (she/her) is a transdisciplinary scholar whose work sits at the intersections of Black Studies and Native and Indigenous Studies, with affiliations in UC San Diego’s Design Lab and the Indigenous Futures Institute.

Eure’s teaching interests include African American experimental fiction; poetics and visual culture; Critical Indigenous Studies; settler-plantation slavery and its afterlives; Indigenous Futurisms; comparative studies of race, gender and empire; and archival theories and methods.

She is currently completing her first book, “The Grammar of Kinship: Black and Native Intimacies in the Nineteenth Century.” The project examines the literary and legal effacement of Black and Native kinship ties, as well as the new forms of kin-making and literary expression that emerged in response during the 19th century. Before joining UC San Diego, Eure was an assistant professor of English at Lehman College, CUNY.

Eure earned a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Pennsylvania; an MFA in creative writing from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; a master’s degree in Latin American and Caribbean Studies from University of Chicago; and bachelor’s degree in Portuguese and Brazilian Studies from Smith College.