Kristalyn Shefveland
Dr. Kristalyn Marie Shefveland is a historian, educator, and yoga teacher whose work bridges scholarship, storytelling, and embodied practice. She serves as Professor of History and Assistant Dean in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Southern Indiana, where she teaches courses in early American history, the Atlantic World, cultural exchange, and historical memory.
Her research explores the intersections of colonialism, Native history, cultural encounter, and the construction of historical narratives. She is the author of Anglo-Native Virginia and Selling Vero Beach: Settler Myths in the Land of the Aís and Seminole (University Press of Florida, 2024). Her current book project examines the history, lineage, and cultural evolution of modern hot yoga traditions. In addition to her academic writing, she contributes public history and regional foodways columns to the Maturity Journal, often highlighting the people, restaurants, and stories that shaped life in southern Indiana.
Beyond the university, Kristalyn is an E-RYT 500 yoga teacher with more than two decades of personal practice and extensive training in the Barkan Method of Hot Yoga. She is the co-founder and lead trainer of the Sankalpa Method 200-Hour Yoga Teacher Training in Evansville, Indiana, where she integrates yoga philosophy, anatomy, history, and mindful movement into teacher education.
Whether in the classroom, the yoga studio, or the archives, her work centers on connection: between past and present, scholarship and lived experience, discipline and creativity.
