Bauer Research Earns Awards
Brooke Bauer, assistant professor of Native American history, was recognized at the college’s spring awards ceremony for Excellence in Research/Creative Achievement. This caps off a remarkable string of recognition for her 2022 book, Becoming Catawba: Catawba Indian Women and Nation Building, 1500-1940. Bauer’s work investigates Catawba women as central characters in the history of the Catawba people, examining their vital roles as women, mothers, providers, and protectors to reveal how they created and maintained an identity for their people and helped build a nation.
Becoming Catawba has received book awards from three different disciplinary organizations—the American Society of Ethnohistory, the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, and the South Carolina Historical Society.
Bauer’s colleagues in the history department also recognized her this spring with the annual Leroy Graf Award. The award committee noted that, “In just a few years, she has made a profoundly positive impact on our department, our university, and our community. As a scholar of early American, Native American, and women’s and gender history, Bauer has established herself as a leading scholar whose work makes powerful interventions in multiple fields. Using an innovative set of sources to illuminate processes of nation-building, cultural resilience, and historical continuity that previous scholars have missed, Bauer demonstrates the central importance of women in the formation and preservation of the Catawba Nation in modern-day South Carolina.”
Bauer is currently co-authoring a book that explores how the histories of tribal nations are represented (and misrepresented) in museums and historical sites.