Circe Sturm is a professor in the Department of Anthropology, University of Texas, Austin. She is also an actress, appearing mainly in films and commercials.
Circe Dawn Sturm was born in Houston, Texas. She has described herself as being of mostly German and Sicilian descent, and having Mississippi Choctaw descent through her grandmother, previously mentioning her grandmother also having "very distant" Cherokee heritage. In 2025, Tribal Alliance Against Frauds researched her genealogical background, and found no evidence of Choctaw or Cherokee ancestry. In response, Sturm noted her writing was from the perspective of an anthropologist, rather than a Native American, and that she claimed descendancy, not tribal citizenship, citing family history and a consumer DNA test.
Sturm writes about Cherokee identity politics and race shifting. Blood Politics presents results of her ethnographic fieldwork in the Cherokee Nation from 1995 to 1998. Becoming Indian (2011) discusses the concept of race shifting in more detail. Sturm has been interviewed on issues relating to Cherokee identity, such as the Cherokee Freedmen controversy and Elizabeth Warren's claims to Cherokee ancestry.
Before joining UT Austin, Sturm taught at the University of Oklahoma. Sturm and Craig Cambell launched a project called Mapping Indigenous Texas, to created an interactive tool to teach about Native American tribes in Texas.
In 2003, the American Council of Learned Societies named Strum as a ACLS Fellow for her project "Claiming redness: the racial and cultural politics of becoming Cherokee". In 2011, the Southern Anthropological Society gave Circe Strum a James Mooney Award for her book Becoming Indian: The Struggle over Cherokee Identity in the Twenty-first Century.
In 2024, the University of Texas at Austin awarded Sturm and Craig Campbell a 2023âÂÂ2024 Research & Creative Grant for their project Mapping Indigenous Texas.