Casey Price is a historian of Vast Early America. Casey’s work focuses on the history of cartography and the Native South, specifically the Cherokee. Casey’s dissertation project, “Given to This Land: Mapping Settler Colonialism in Kituwah: 1682-1810,” examines the relationship between cartography and settler colonialism in the Cherokee homelands. The dissertation focuses on maps and mapmakers to shine new light on the processes of settler colonialism in the Southeast region of North America. Alongside violence, mapping territory became a vital component for preempting and solidifying imperial expansion. He takes a bottom-up approach to early American cartographic history by emphasizing Cherokee and African participation in surveying, boundary formation, and mapmaking. Casey’s dissertation demonstrates that changes in cultural identity, agricultural practices, and social connections occurring through incremental changes in land tenure proved significantly more transformative than military violence in the Cherokee homelands. As part of his project, Casey will work with native Cherokee speakers to construct digital maps of the eighteenth-century Cherokee homelands using toponyms from contemporary maps and Cherokee oral traditions regarding the landscape.

His current research project has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Summer Institute at the Newberry Library; 2023-2024 fellowships from The Omohundro Institute, The John Carter Brown Library, The Clements Library, The Filson Historical Society, The Native American Rights Fellowship from The Library Company of Philadelphia and the Pennsylvania Historical Society, The Phillips Fund for Native American Research from the American Philosophical Society, The North Caroliniana Society’s Archie K. Davis Fellowship, FEEGI, and The UTK Center for the Study of War and Society. Casey is a recipient of a year-long 2023-2024 Dissertation Completion Fellowship from the UTK Humanities Center.