Faculty Profile
Darren Lone Fight
Assistant Professor of American Studies (2020)
Contact Information
Denny Hall Room 105
717-254-8105
Bio
Darren Lone Fight arrives at Dickinson from the PhD program in American Studies at the University of Massachusetts. For the last two years, Darren served as visiting faculty in the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora at Tufts University; his recent journal article in Studies in American Indian Literatures explores the political and cultural effect of Indigenous visual artists revising pop-culture iconography in their work. Darren has taught across a diverse range of institutions and organizations, ranging from research universities and small liberal arts colleges to a land conservation organization. Darren feels fortunate to have assisted his former students as a research program mentor, thesis committee member, and faculty advisor, as well as helping students publish their work, win academic awards, and organize campus events. His current work orients around ontologies of narrative and experiential reality in contemporary American Indian art and philosophy.
Education
- B.A., University of North Dakota, 2006
- M.A., University of Massachusetts, 2010
- Ph.D., 2021
2025-2026 Academic Year
Fall 2025
AMST 101 Weird
Structures of Strangeness in American Culture - This course investigates how "the weird" shapes American culture, from frontier tales of strange encounters to contemporary political discourse. What makes something "weird" in American society, who gets to decide, and how has "weirdness" been used both to define and challenge the boundaries of American identity and belonging? Drawing on scholars like Mark Fisher and Grace Dillon, we'll explore different ways of understanding strangeness in the American context-from UFO sightings over suburban landscapes to the othering of immigrant cultures. We'll examine how constructions of the weird operate across American cultural and political landscapes, from mainstream media to collaborative digital storytelling platforms like the SCP Foundation. Through analysis of American conspiracy theories, urban legends, experimental media, and other cultural forms, we'll investigate national anxieties about difference, deviance, and the unknown. The course emphasizes how marginalized communities, especially Indigenous cosmologies and ontologies, have historically been categorized as "weird" while simultaneously offering powerful alternative ways of understanding reality and experience. Through engagement with cultural texts ranging from weird fiction and film to video games and digital communities, students will develop tools for analyzing how the weird operates as both a tool of exclusion and a method of reimagining American identity and experience. Students will analyze how "weird" functions in contemporary American discourse, examine strange phenomena in popular culture, and create their own weird encounter narratives that thoughtfully engage our course concepts. Throughout, we'll consider how examining the weird can help us understand and reimagine American cultural boundaries and possibilities.
AMST 303 Indigenous Theory
This advanced seminar explores Indigenous theoretical frameworks that challenge and transcend settler-colonial paradigms of knowledge, power, and being. Moving beyond simplified understandings of decolonization as metaphor, we examine how Indigenous intellectuals and communities conceptualize and enact sovereignty across multiple registers: political, cultural, epistemological, and temporal. The course centers pivotal theoretical interventions from Indigenous scholars while emphasizing their active deployment in contemporary contexts. We begin with Eve Tuck (Unangax^) and K. Wayne Yang's critique of decolonization-as-metaphor before exploring Linda Tuhiwai Smith's (Māori: Ngāti Awa and Ngāti Porou) foundational work on Indigenous methodologies. Vine Deloria Jr.'s (Lakota) incisive analysis of Western thought and Gerald Vizenor's (White Earn Anishinaabe) concept of survivance provide theoretical frameworks for understanding how Indigenous knowledge systems operate beyond the constraints of settler temporalities and categories. Through engagement with LeAnne Howe's (Choctaw) theory of tribalography, we examine how Indigenous narrative traditions serve as technologies of regeneration and futurity rather than mere representations of the past. The course brings these theoretical frameworks into conversation with tribal legal traditions and Indigenous environmental thought, exploring how sovereignty manifests in governance structures and relationships with land. Special attention is paid to how these theoretical frameworks illuminate contemporary challenges around climate change, resource extraction, and competing claims to authority and knowledge. Drawing from American Studies and Native American and Indigenous Studies methodologies, students will develop sophisticated analytical and theoretical tools for examining how Indigenous critical approaches reframe questions of power, knowledge, representation, and possibility. Through intensive reading, discussion, and research, we'll explore how Indigenous theory offers not just critique but generative possibilities for reimagining relationships between peoples, systems, and worlds.
AMST 401 Research and Methods in Am St
This integrative seminar focuses on the theory and methods of cultural analysis and interdisciplinary study. Students examine the origins, history, and current state of American studies, discuss relevant questions, and, in research projects, apply techniques of interdisciplinary study to a topic of their choosing.
Prerequisite: 303, Senior American studies major, or permission of the instructor.