The Chattanooga History Center, in cooperation with the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga, will present Cherokee Women, a lecture by Theda Perdue, Atlanta Distinguished Term Professor of Southern Culture at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
The program will take place at 7:00pm on Thursday, April 17th in the Benwood Auditorium in UTC’s Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science Building. There is no admission fee.
Perdue has published extensively on the subjects of Native peoples in the southeastern United States, gender in Native societies, and racial construction in the South. Among her best known work is Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700-1885, which won the Julia Cherry Spruill Award for the best book in southern women’s history and the James Mooney Prize for best book in the anthropology of the South.
Becky Matthews of Auburn University, writing for Alabama Review, April 2000, stated: “Cherokee Women is a valuable addition to the growing scholarship on American Indian women. Nonspecialists interested in native people will enjoy its clarity of style and organization. Specialists and students…will appreciate its challenging themes, fruitful methodology, and astute analysis of sources.”
More recently, Perdue edited an anthology, Sifters: The Lives of Native American Women (2001), for which she wrote an essay, “Catherine Brown: Cherokee Convert to Christianity,” as well as the book’s introduction.
In conjunction with Professor Michael D. Green, she has published The Columbia Guide to American Indians of the Southeast (2001) and The Cherokee Removal: A Brief History with Documents (1995, 2nd edition, 2005). In October, 2001, Professor Perdue delivered the Lamar Lectures at Mercer University, published as “Mixed Blood” Indians: Racial Construction in the Early South (2003).
She has served as president of the Southern Association for Women Historians and the American Society for Ethnohistory . In 2006-2007, she was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. She also has a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation fellowship.
For more information, call 423-265-3247.