Lucas Kelley

Lucas Kelley is an assistant professor of history at Valparaiso University, where he teaches courses on Native history, early America, and public history. His first book,Marking Native Borders: Indigenous Geography and American Empire in the Early Tennessee Country, is a study of how Chickasaws and Cherokees appropriated legal and social concepts from white Americans to defend their territory from the forces of the settler state. He is working on additional projects involving the layered history of the Nickajack region in southeastern Tennessee and northern Georgia and the connection between public universities and Native dispossession in the early Republic era.

Dissertation Title: “‘We Will Mark a Line for the White People’: Territoriality and Nation-Making in the Tennessee and Cumberland River Valleys, 1770-1820”