Natalee Kehaulani Bauer

Natalee Kēhaulani Bauer (she/hers) is a Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) scholar born in Honolulu and raised between/across Hawai’i and the San Francisco Bay Area. She is an associate teaching professor of Indigenous Studies at Mills College at Northeastern University in Oakland, CA.  Her new book, Tender Violence in US Schools: Benevolent Whiteness and the Dangers of Heroic White Womanhood (Routledge, Nov. 2022), deploys Indigenous feminist methodologies to understand the problem of the over-disciplining of Black and Native students; she does this by constructing a genealogy of “benevolent whiteness,” focusing on how white women (the majority of US teachers) have for generations understood their roles as “heroes” in U.S. classrooms, while simultaneously participating in the disciplining of nonwhite student bodies in service to the white settler colonial State.

• Cultural studies
• Indigenous studies
• History of education/schooling in the US

• Indigenous feminisms
• critical whiteness studies 
• history of schooling

• UC Berkeley, PhD in Social & Cultural Studies in Education, 2017
• UC Berkeley, MA in Social & Cultural Studies in Education, 2012
• Mills College, MA in English and American Literature, 2007
• Mills College, BA in English and American Literature, 1997

• May Treat Morrison Professorship in American History, Mills College at Northeastern University
• Program Chair, Ethnic Studies, Mills College
• Department Chair, Race Gender and Sexuality Studies, Mills College

• Mills College, Elizabeth Siekhaus Faculty Achievement Award, 2021

• Bauer, N. K. (2022) Tender Violence in US Schools: Benevolent whiteness and the dangers of heroic white womanhood. Routledge.
• Bauer, N. K.  and Watson, W. (2022). Exploring a critical race inquiry approach to the professional development of elementary school Teachers of Color. In C.D. Gist and T.J. Bristol (Eds.), Handbook of Research on Teachers of  Color and Indigenous Teachers. American Educational Research Association.
• Bauer, N. K. (2020). What’s love got to do with it?: Toward a theory of benevolent whiteness in education. The Urban Review.