William Parish IV

William Parish is a PhD candidate in History with a PhD minor in Computer Science at Stanford University whose research combines Indigenous history, phenomenology, machine learning, and robotics to investigate questions of temporality, spatiality, embodiment, and relational structure.

His dissertation reconceptualizes Indigenous sovereignty through an historical analysis of Cherokee life in the early twentieth century. Rejecting sovereignty as a fixed legal or juridical category, William instead examines sovereignty as something lived, reproduced, and historically articulated across practices, institutions, and everyday forms of life. Drawing from phenomenology, dialectical thought, Indigenous epistemologies, and continental and analytic philosophy, his work investigates how sovereignty is embodied and continually re-constituted through the Cherokee lifeworld as a spatial and temporal mode of collective existence capable of persistence through transformation.

In parallel, William conducts research in geometric machine learning and robotics, with a particular focus on spectral graph methods, graph signal processing, harmonic analysis, and geometric representation learning for spatiotemporal reasoning, embodied inference, and autonomous navigation. His current projects include analyzing how graph neural networks imbricate algorithmic and historical time, as well as exploring how to better encode relationality in geometric deep learning architectures. Across these projects, he is particularly interested in how mathematical and computational models represent temporality, relational structure, memory, and continuity across historical reasoning and artificial intelligence.