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Department of

History

Lehigh University's Linderman Library in the fall
Michelle LeMaster portrait

Michelle LeMaster

Associate Professor

610.758.3358
mil206@lehigh.edu
Room 343 - Maginnes Hall
Education:

Ph.D., The Johns Hopkins University

M.A., The Johns Hopkins University

B.A., Western Washington University

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Additional Interests

  • Colonial British America
  • Native America
  • Atlantic World
  • Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Research Statement

Professor LeMaster’s research focuses on European and Native relations in the colonial North American Southeast in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and emphasizes ethnohistorical and Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS) methodologies.  Her current work explores the effect that differing cultural attitudes toward the use of violence had on intercultural conflict, focusing specifically on the so-called Tuscarora War in North Carolina between 1711 and 1715.  The Tuscarora War represented the high-point of the Indian slave trade in the region, and demonstrates the influence that slave raiding/captive taking, global trade, and land encroachment had on regional cultures of violence.

 

Biography

In addition to teaching in the History Department, Professor LeMaster is also director of the Lawrence Henry Gipson Institute for Eighteen Century Studies.

Books: 

  • Brothers Born of One Mother: British-Native American Relations in the Colonial Southeast.  Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012.
  • Creating and Contesting Carolina: Proprietary Era Histories.  Co-edited with Bradford J. Wood.  Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2013.

Select Articles/Chapters:

  • “Pocahontas Doesn’t Live Here Anymore: Women and Gender in the Native South before Removal,” Native South 7 (2014): 1-32.
  • “War, Masculinity, and Alliances on the Carolina Frontiers.”  In Creating and Contesting Carolina (2013).
  • “In the ‘Scolding Houses’: Indians and the Law in Eastern North Carolina, 1684-1760,” North Carolina Historical Review 83, no. 2 (April 2006): 193-232. Recipient of the R.D.W. Connor Award.  

Teaching

History 025: Pirates of the Caribbean and Other Rogues of the Atlantic World
History 041: The Making and Breaking of the United States
History 090: First Year Seminar: The Wild, Wild West
History 120: Revolutionary America
History/WGSS 124: Women and Gender in the U.S.
History 302: The Capstone Experience
History 319/419: Colonial America (to 1763)
History 320/420: History of North American Indians
History 367/467: The Rise and Fall of the Old South
History 401: Historical Research
History 440: Readings in Colonial America: General
History 440: Readings in Colonial America: Native America
History 440: Readings in Colonial America: The Eighteenth Century
History 440: Readings in Colonial America: The Seventeenth Century