Julie Reed
Associate Professor in History
214 Weaver Building
University Park, PA 16802
Phone: (814) 863-0105
Curriculum Vitae:
Education:
PhD in American History, UNC-Chapel Hill, 2011
M.A. in American History, UNC-Chapel Hill, 2008
M.T.S. in Theological Studies, Perkins School of Theology-SMU, 2000
B.A. in English Literature, University of South Florida, 1998
Biography:
Julie L. Reed is a historian of Native American History, with an emphasis on Southeastern Indians and Cherokee History, and American Education.
Reed’s current project, tentatively titled “ “The Means of Education Shall Forever Be Encouraged in this Nation”: A Cherokee and American Educational History,” reconsiders Cherokee educational history. Instead of assuming Cherokee educational efforts begin with Christian missionaries, U.S. officials, and Sequoyah’s invention of the syllabary in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Reed roots education in older forms of knowledge transmission and a general belief among Cherokee people that every member of Cherokee society regardless of age or gender could learn from or teach every other member of society. Given the far more expansive and less rigid access to knowledge, Reed will consider how this older system moved forward as both Cherokees and non-Cherokees offered new ideas about the purposes, accessibility, and goals of education.
Her first book Serving the Nation: Cherokee Sovereignty and Social Welfare, 1800-1907 (University of Oklahoma, 2016) examined the shift by Cherokee people from a holistic system of care for others rooted within a matrilineal clan system and governed by local community obligations that stretched across towns to the rise of nationally administered social services by the Cherokee Nation to individual citizens. This shift ultimately resulted in the creation of an orphanage, a prison, and a facility for the (dis)abled and mentally ill in the period after the Civil War. Reed considers major turning points and the internal debates that led to changes in Cherokee social policy, how these changes in social policy both mirrored and deviated from changes happening in the larger United States, and the ways institutions served to protect Cherokee sovereignty when allotment and Oklahoma statehood threatened.
Selected Awards and Fellowships
American Academy of Education/Spencer Small Research Grant, Spencer Foundation, 2019
David J. Weber Fellow for the Study of Southwestern America, William P. Clements Center, SMU, 2013-2014
Phillips Fund Grant for Native American Research, American Philosophical Society, 2009
Frances C. Allen Fellowship, Newberry Library, 2009
Selected Publications
Serving the Nation: Cherokee Sovereignty and Social Welfare, 1800-1907 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, April 2016)
Carroll, B., A. Cressler, T. Belt, M. White, W. Adams, J. Reed, and J. Simek, “The Red
Bird River Shelter (15cy52) Revisited: The Archaeology of Cherokee
Syllabary and of Sequoyah in Kentucky” (Forthcoming April 2019, American Antiquity)
Carroll, B., A. Cressler, T. Belt, J. Reed, and J. Simek, “Talking stones: Cherokee
syllabary in Manitou Cave, Alabama.” (Forthcoming April 2019, Antiquity)
“’An Absolute and Unconditional Pardon’: Nineteenth Century Cherokee Indigenous
Justice.” In Legacies: Essays on the Native South, edited by Greg O’Brien and
Tim Garrison (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017): 126-143.
“Whose Stories Get Told,” In Marked, Unmarked, Remembered: A Photographic
Geography of American Historical Memory, edited by Alex Lichtenstein and
Andrew Lichtenstein, (Morgantown: West Virginia Press, forthcoming).