Thomas Brasdefer completed his graduate work in France at Université d'Artois and Université de Poitiers in American Civilization and Teaching Foreign Languages. He then received a PhD in Anthropology and Geography from Louisiana State University.

He studies indigenous sovereignty in the United States through the lens of language policies, against the background of US federal law and the larger conceptions of US politics. This could mean ensuring that indigenous children are learning their own history in school, or sometimes recovering a dictionary that was written 100 years ago by an anthropologist in passing; sometimes it is both of these things at the same time.