Associate Professor of History
Email: email@example.com Phone: 713-348-2780 Office: Humanities 319
- PhD: Emory University 2003
- MA: Emory University 2000
Areas of Interest:
- American Indian History
- African American History
- Southern History
research interests focus on the native populations of the southeastern United
States and Indian Territory during the nineteenth century. She is particularly interested in the
interactions between indigenous peoples and people of African descent.
Her first book Race
and the Cherokee Nation: Sovereignty in the Nineteenth Century explores the complex relationship
between the construction of sexual boundaries and the formation of tribal and
racial identities. The study analyzes
how Cherokee lawmakers used marriage laws to construct conceptions of race and
gender in the face of Jackson’s Indian policies and how the Civil War and
Reconstruction reconfigured the thinking of Cherokee legislators.
Professor Yarbrough also
co-edited a collection of essays entitled Gender and Sexuality in the
Indigenous Americas, 1400-1850
with Sandra Slater (College of Charleston). The anthology addresses the question of how
Europeans manipulated native ideas about gender for their own purposes and how
indigenous people responded to European attempts to impose gendered cultural
practices that clashed with native thinking.
Currently, Professor Yarbrough is working on a project that considers
the participation of Choctaw Indians in the American Civil War.
teaches courses on nineteenth-century American history. In the past, she has offered courses such as
the Civil War, the first half of the American history survey, and
Nineteenth-Century Black Experience.
Race and the Cherokee
Nation: Sovereignty in the Nineteenth Century, University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2008.
Gender and Sexuality
in Indigenous North America, 1400-1850, co-editor with Sandra Slater,
University of South Carolina Press, 2011.
“From Kin to Intruder: Cherokee Legal Attitudes towards
People of African Descent
in the Nineteenth Century,” Race and Science, edited by
Hamilton Cravens and Paul
Farber for Oregon State University Press, 2009.
“Power, Perception, and Interracial Sex: Former Slaves
Recall a Multiracial South,”
Journal of Southern History, August 2005.
“Legislating Women’s Sexuality: Cherokee Marriage Laws in
the Nineteenth Century,”
Journal of Social
History, Winter 2004.