Nikki Grigg is an anthropological archaeologist who studies citizenship, race, and diaspora in the nineteenth century United States. Her research explores the contradictions of citizenship and how urban residents fashion alternative forms of power and community. Her current book project, Home Rule: A Domestic Archaeology of Citizenship in Gilded Age Washington, DC, examines how immigrant and migrant Washingtonians shaped U.S. citizenship in the nation’s capital in the decades following the Civil War. Combining excavation, re-analysis of archaeological collections, and archival research, she investigates how Washingtonians’ everyday household consumption allowed them to exercise sovereignty and change the terms of belonging. Her second project focuses on long histories of housing crisis in D.C. to analyze shifting relationships between local and federal power, the built environment, and the futures we imagine for cities. Grigg has worked on archaeological excavations and collections management in D.C., Virginia, and England. In 2026-2027, she will teach in the Department of Anthropology and in the Civilization Studies course sequence of the Social Sciences Core.