Faculty

Daniel H. Usner, Jr.
Holland M. McTyeire Professor of History

PhD, Duke University, 1981

American Indian history; early American history; race and class in the American South; U.S. social, cultural, and economic history.

Telephone:  615-322-5949
Email:daniel.h.usner@vanderbilt.edu
Office Hours: Mondays 11:30-1 pm, Thursdays 9:30 - 11 am
Office: 222 Benson Hall

Daniel Usner is the author of Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley before 1783 (University of North Carolina Press, 1992), which won the Jamestown Prize from the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the John H. Dunning Prize from the American Historical Association.  His other books are American Indians in the Lower Mississippi Valley: Social and Economic Histories (University of Nebraska Press, 1998) and Indian Work: Language and Livelihood in American History (Harvard University Press, 2009).  Usner also co-edited, with Charles Geisler and Rayna Green, Indian SIA: The Social Impact Assessment of Rapid Resource Development on Native Peoples (University of Michigan School of Natural Resources, 1982).  His current projects include a book on the Chitimacha Indians in the early 20th century and a book on the political sovereignty of American Indians.

Usner has received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Cornell University Society for the Humanities, the Council for International Exchange of Scholars, the Huntington Library, the Newberry Library, the School for Advanced Research, and the Robert Penn Warren Center.  He has served on the councils of the American Society for Ethnohistory and the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture.  Usner is a member of the editorial board for Native South, a new academic journal published by the University of Nebraska Press.  He regularly leads U.S. history teacher workshops around the nation for the National Council for History Education.

Daniel Usner served as President of the American Society for Ethnohistory during 2010-11. In November 2011 he will deliver the Michael D. Green Lecture in American Indian History at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. For 2013 he has also been invited to present the Lamar Memorial Lectures at Mercer University.

Daniel Usner’s research pursues a comparative understanding of empires, colonies, Indian nations, and borderlands in early American history and a deeper knowledge about the complex relationship between culture and economy in race relations.  He also explores the survival of Indian communities in the deep South.  Usner teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on American Indian history, colonial North America, and Indians in the eastern United States.