KJ LeFave (she/her) is a first-year MA student in History at the University of Oklahoma, where she serves as a graduate research assistant to Dr. Anne Hyde. Her work investigates how gender and power shaped the citation of Indigenous voices in 18th- and 19th-century narratives of the Northern Great Lakes. She focuses primarily on the roles that settler and Indigenous women played in shaping the intellectual practices that informed historical memory and scholarly authority, as well as the ways they were excluded from this process.
KJ earned her Bachelor of Arts in History with Honors from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, along with minors in American Indian and Indigenous Studies and African American Studies. Her undergraduate honors thesis, "Politics of Citation - the Indispensability and Attempted Erasure of Ojibwe Women in the Works of Schoolcraft, Johnston, and Cadotte CA 1772-1842" won the first place Andrew Bergman prize for best undergraduate paper written for a history course.
Outside of OU, she contributes to the Historical Archives Research Team at UW–Madison’s Center for Health Disparities Research, where she supports archival projects on structural inequities in healthcare. In her free time, she enjoys hiking, backpacking, crocheting, doting on her cat, weightlifting, and reading.
