2024 Michael D. Green Lecture in American Indian Studies

Save the date! Join us in partnership with the American Indian and Indigenous Studies for the annual Michael D. Green lecture featuring Dr. Malinda Maynor Lowery.

Malinda Maynor Lowery is a historian and film producer who is a member of the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina. In July 2021 she joined Emory University as the Cahoon Family Professor of American History, after spending 12 years at UNC-Chapel Hill and 4 years at Harvard University. Her second book, The Lumbee Indians: An American Struggle, was published by UNC Press in 2018. The book is a survey of Lumbee history from the eighteenth century to the present, written for a general audience. Her first book, Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South: Race, Identity, and the Making of a Nation (UNC Press, 2010) won several awards, including Best First Book from the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association. She has written or co-written almost fifty book chapters or articles, on topics including American Indian migration and identity, school desegregation, federal recognition, religious music, and foodways, and has published essays for popular audiences in places like the Washington Post, Oxford American, and Daily Yonder. She has won fellowships and grants from the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Sundance Institute, the Ford Foundation, and others. Films she has produced include the Peabody Award-winning A Chef’s Life (PBS, 2013-2018), Somewhere South (PBS, 2020), Road to Race Day (Crackle, 2020), the Emmy-nominated Private Violence (HBO, 2014), In the Light of Reverence (PBS, 2001), and two short films, Real Indian (1996), and Sounds of Faith (1997), both of which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. In 2022 she completed “What’s So Funny?”, a media experience for the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History. In 2023, she completed “Lumbeeland,” her first narrative short film, which is currently showing in film festivals. She currently serves as President-Elect of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, and as founding Faculty Director of Emory’s Center for Native American and Indigenous Studies.