Karen V. Hansen (born 1955) is an American author and professor of sociology and women's and gender studies at Brandeis University.
Hansen received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Norwegian Royal Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
[1] Her latest book, Encounter on the Great Plains (Oxford University Press, 2013), comes after 15 years of research and writing, and a dozen trips to North Dakota.
Her interest in the nexus of community and inequality is the starting point of this study of the Spirit Lake Dakota Indian Reservation in the early twentieth century.
Encounter chronicles the processes that created ethnically mixed communities and mingled the separate and intertwining stories of Dakotas and immigrants—women and men, farmers, domestic servants, and day laborers—and their shared struggles to maintain a language, practice a culture, and honor loyalties to more than one nation.