SAIO 50 for 50: Dr. Malinda Lowery
This Week's Spotlight: Dr. Malinda Lowery ('97, M.A. Communication)
Dr. Lowery (Lumbee) is a Professor of History at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Director of the Center for the Study of the American South, and Co-Director of the Southern Futures Initiative. Her second book, The Lumbee Indians: An American Struggle, is a survey of Lumbee history from the eighteenth century to the present. Her first book, Lumbee Indians in the Jim Crow South: Race, Identity, and the Making of a Nation, won several awards, including Best First Book of 2010 in Native American and Indigenous Studies and the Labriola American Indian Center National Book Prize. She has written on topics including American Indian migration and identity, school desegregation, federal recognition, religious music, and foodways, and has published essays in the New York Times, Oxford American, The North Star, and Scalawag Magazine. She has won multiple fellowships and grants including from the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Sundance Institute, and the Ford Foundation.
Dr. Lowery has produced documentary films, including the Peabody Award-winning A Chef’s LifeA Chef’s Life (5 seasons on PBS), the Emmy-nominated Private Violence (broadcast on HBO in 2014), In the Light of Reverence (broadcast on PBS in 2001), and two short films, Real Indian (1996), and Sounds of Faith (1997), both of which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.
In addition to her Stanford degree, Dr. Lowery holds a bachelor’s cum laude in history and literature from Harvard, a master’s and Ph.D. in history from UNC-Chapel Hill.