William Parish IV

William (Cherokee Nation) is a PhD candidate in Transnational, International, and Global History and a PhD Minor candidate in the Computer Science department. His historical research broadly focuses on questions of sovereignty and political power among the Cherokee in Oklahoma, Q’eqchi’ Maya in Belize, and Wayana in French Guiana. William’s dissertation specifically explores how the sovereignty of his own tribe, the Cherokee Nation, evolved from the allotment era through the advent of the self-determination era in the 1970s. Through this work, he aims to reconceptualize the idea of Indigenous sovereignty by utilizing a phenomenological and dialectical framework grounded in the Cherokee concept of gadugi.

In computer science, William works in artificial intelligence and robotics, with a broad focus on perception, motion, and reasoning in embodied AI. More specifically, he engages with foundational questions surrounding graph neural networks (GNNs) and their potential applications. William combines his computer science and history research by examining how Indigenous epistemologies can be brought into conversation with the epistemological challenges posed by artificial intelligence, and how AI may open new avenues for studying history and historiography.