Thomas Harriot Lecture

Native Americans of North Carolina

Dr. Theda Perdue is a nationally recognized authority on the native peoples of the southeastern United States, and on gender in native societies.  

Dr. Perdue is the author or co-author of seven books including Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700-1835 (1998), which won the Southern Association of Women’s Historian’s Julia Cherry Spruill Award and the Southern Anthropological Society’s James Mooney Prize. More recently, she has published "Mixed Blood" Indians: Racial Construction in the Early South (2003) and, with co-author Michael D. Green, The Columbia Guide to American Indians of the Southeast (2001) and The Cherokee Nation and the Trail of Tears (2007). She is the editor or co-editor of six books including Sifters: The Lives of Native American Women (2001).  

Dr. Perdue has held a number of fellowships including ones from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Newberry Library, and the Rockefeller Foundation. She has served as president of the Southern Association for Women Historians (1985-86) and the American Society for Ethnohistory (2001). 

Dr. Perdue currently has three projects underway: a book on Indians in the segregated South, the Averitt lectures on race and the Cotton States Exposition which will be published as Race and the Atlanta Cotton States Exposition (2010), and, with Michael D. Green, A Very Short Introduction to North American Indians.