Biography
Professor Keely Smith specializes in Native American and early American history.
Research Interests
Professor Smith’s research focuses on southeastern Native nations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Her book project, tentatively titled, “Communicating Sovereignty: A History of the Mvskoke Language, 1715-1880,” investigates the ways in which the Mvskoke language enabled the making and maintenance of Muscogee sovereignty in the Southeast and so-called Indian Territory, from the 1715 Yamasee War through the late 19th-century implementation of a written Mvskoke language.
Teaching Interests
In addition to courses surveying Native American and early American history, Professor Smith is excited to offer courses on the Native South, the history of Native American languages and language revitalization, Native American dispossession and removals, and race and gender in early America.
Selected Publications
“‘Of themselves or from their Grandmothers advise’: Women’s Communication Networks and Maintenance of Muscogee Cultural Sovereignty, 1796-1814,” essay in Gender in the Native South: A Reinterpretation of Women, Men, and Two-Spirit Peoples Before 1850. Edited by Jennifer McCutchen and Jamie Mize. Under peer review by University of Nebraska Press, 2025.