Brooke Bauer

Brooke Michele Bauer is a citizen of Catawba Indian Nation. She works as a Catawba ethnohistorian, author and professor who has published several books on the history of the Catawba people and other Catawban-speaking peoples of the Eastern Woodlands. published books, lectured and been on podcasts to talk about the contributions of Catawba women to the Catawba Confederacy alongside more general histories of the Catawban-speaking peoples of the Piedmont region and their interactions with British colonizers. She is the first Catawba person to earn a doctorate degree and is a speaker of the Catawba language. During her childhood, she learned stories and how to create pottery by watching her elders and matriarchs. Two of her brothers later served in the Catawba Nation government. She then earned a Doctorate of Philosophy in History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with her graduating in May 2016.

In August 2016, she became a history professor at the University of South Carolina Lancaster to teach early American history and Native American studies. She later moved on to being a history professor at the University of Tenneessee.

Awards For her book, Becoming Catawba: Catawba Indian Women and Nation Building, 1540-1840, she received the 2023 Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin Book Award from the American Society for Ethnohistory and the 2020-21 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Native American Scholars Initiative Fellowship at the American Philosophical Center in Philadelphia. She also won the Berks Conference Annual Book Prize in 2022 alongside the George C. Rogers Jr. Award from South Carolina Historical Society.