Theresa Warburton, PhD

she/they, Professor

About

Pronunciation: tuh-REE-sah WAR-bur-tun

Theresa Warburton is an educator, scholar, and organizer originally from the East Coast and now living in the Pacific Northwest. Her work in all these capacities focuses on both the historic and potential relationship between literature and radical social movements. They teach foundational courses in Native and Indigenous Literatures, Queer Studies, and Anarchist Studies as well as courses that engage critically with a broad range of storytelling forms from true crime to basketball.

Her scholarship and public writing has been published widely, including in field-specific journals like Studies in American Indian Literatures and Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies. They also support radical publishing by serving on the collective for the journal Perspectives on Anarchist Theory, which published a 30-year retrospective collection in 2026 titled Visions and Interventions (AK Press). The journal is a publication of the Institute for Anarchist Studies, on which she also serves as a board member.

She has published two books, one monograph titled Other Worlds Here: Honoring Native Women's Writing in Contemporary Anarchist Movements (Northwestern University Press, 2021) and Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers, co-edited with Elissa Washuta (University of Washington Press, 2019). They are currently working on a few different projects, including two books for public audiences, one an introduction to Native and Indigenous Literatures and one a critical engagement with settler colonialism in contemporary anarchist and abolitionist movements.

Professor Warburton is also the current President of the United Faculty of Western Washington, the labor union that represents faculty at WWU. She believes strongly in the labor movement's commitment to dividing the day by 8 hours of work / 8 hours of rest / 8 hours of play, so when they aren't at work you'll find them watching live music, catching a basketball game, hanging out with her two cats, and reading lots of books that they track on their public Bookstagram account @WhatTheresaReads.

Research Interests

  • Native and Indigenous Literatures
  • Queer Studies
  • Anarchist Studies
  • Prison Abolition
  • Social Movement History and Literature