Theda Perdue

Theda Perdue is Atlanta Distinguished Term Professor of Southern Culture in the history department at UNC - Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on the Native peoples of the southeastern United States, on gender in Native societies, and on racial construction in the South. Her book, Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700-1835 (1998), won the Julia Cherry Spruill Award for the best book in southern women's history and the James Mooney Prize for the best book in the anthropology of the South. More recently, she has 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 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 ed., 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 (1985-86) and the American Society for Ethnohistory (2001).

Professor Perdue currently is working on a book on Indians in the segregated South. In 2006-2007, she is a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C.. She also has a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation fellowship.