Professor Beth Rose Middleton Manning 

IAS Fellow at Trevelyan College, October - December 2025

Contact Details

• Home Institution email:  brmiddleton@ucdavis.edu
• Durham email: TBC
• Durham Tel: TBC

Beth Rose Middleton Manning is Professor in the Department of Native American Studies at the University of California, Davis. A National Science Foundation graduate research fellow, she completed her PhD in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at UC Berkeley (2002-2008) under the supervision of Professor Louise Fortmann, on indigenous political ecology in the context of Mountain Maidu reclamation of stewardship of traditional homelands. Following her doctoral work, Professor Middleton Manning completed a UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship (2008-2010) under the supervision of Professor Ben Orlove in Environmental Science and Policy at UC Davis and conducted research on the application of conservation law and policy to Indigenous site protection, stewardship, and access.  

For the past 14 years, Professor Middleton Manning has served as Assistant Professor (2010-2014), Associate Professor (2014-2019), Department Chair (2018-2021), Full Professor (2019-present, and Yocha Dehe Endowed Chair of California Indian Studies (2014-present), in the Department of Native American Studies at UC Davis. She has authored two books, Trust in the Land: New Directions in Tribal Conservation (2011, University of Arizona Press), and Upstream: Trust Lands and Power on the Feather River (2018, University of Arizona Press). Trust in the Land articulates for the first time the application of land trust and other private conservation tools to tribal land stewardship, access, and protection objectives. In 2012, she was awarded the Environmental Leadership Award from Ecology Law Quarterly (UC Berkeley Boalt Hall School of Law) for Trust in the Land. The research for Upstream was supported in part by a UC President’s Faculty Research Fellowship in the Humanities, which allowed Middleton Manning to trace the history of over 600 individual Indian public domain allotment lands, many of which were canceled or sold for hydroelectric and timber development without allottee consent. The information on these allotments was previously only partially available in disparate federal, tribal, state, and private archives. Middleton Manning examined the challenges faced by descendants of these allottees trying to reclaim the lands in multiple articles and Upstream.  

Professor Middleton Manning has published 22 articles, 10 book chapters, and co-edited three special issues. She has made interventions in political ecology to advance its engagement with Indigenous epistemologies; supported the praxis of land return and restoration through tribal applications of conservation easements, land trusts, and (under certain conditions) carbon offsets; advanced the application of an environmental justice lens to water planning and restoration; and developed educational and research initiatives centering the importance of cultural fire in climate adaptation.   

Professor Middleton Manning is a sought-after advisor, currently supervising or co-supervising 18 PhD students and two Master’s students, and advising two undergraduates on their undergraduate theses. She also serves as co-champion for the Reimagining the Land Grant University Grand Challenge, which strives to investigate the ways in which the land grant history has impacted Indigenous populations, and then build relationships between Indigenous peoples and the university to co-develop pathways of repair. Professor Middleton Manning also manages an Environment and Climate Justice Initiative in the Institute of the Environment at UC Davis, which supports graduate student scholars working on environment and climate justice research. Professor Middleton Manning has many other service responsibilities on and off campus, including an active seat on the boards of two non-profit organizations, on an advisory committee for the Native Land Trust Council, and on the Steering Committee for the prestigious NOAA Cooperative Programs for the Advancement of Earth System Science postdoctoral fellowship.  

During the visiting period at Durham, Professor Middleton Manning looks forward to engaging with Dr Paolo Fortis (Anthropology), Dr Laura Leon-Llerena (Modern Languages and Cultures), and Professor Gillian Bentley (Anthropology) on the importance of centering Indigenous epistemologies in decolonizing environmental policy and planning. She plans to conduct research in British archives to support navigating British common law for Indigenous land rematriation/repatriation in former colonial states, and to continue research and writing on tribal leadership in dam removal in a range of American and Canadian contexts. 

Events

TBC