34.5 F
Clarksville
Thursday, March 28, 2024
HomeEventsAPSU Provost Lecture Series: History professor Dr. Kristofer Ray to present next...

APSU Provost Lecture Series: History professor Dr. Kristofer Ray to present next session

Austin Peay State UniversityClarksville, TN – An Austin Peay State University history professor, whose expertise is in colonial and revolutionary America, will be the next presenter of the Provost Lecture Series at APSU.

Dr. Kristofer Ray, associate professor of history, will present at 3:00pm, Thursday, March 21st in the Morgan University Center, Room 303. All sessions of the Provost Lecture Series are free and open to the public.

The title of his presentation is “Cherokees and Franco-British Confrontation in the Tennessee Corridor, 1748-1758.”

His presentation will explore the British Carolinian mindset on issues of the Tennessee River, Cherokee diplomacy and fortification in the era of the Seven Years’ War.

“Carolinians had long comprehended the value of this river to their vision of a British trans-Appalachian empire,” Ray said. “As early as the Yamassee War they feared that the French could use it to pressure them from the lower Ohio Valley. This perception pushed them to attempt a Cherokee alliance, or ‘chain of friendship,’ and to encourage Cherokees to launch raids down the Tennessee to the Illinois and Wabash country.”

Subsequent confrontation led to thirty-plus years of posturing between Cherokees, the French, and British Carolinians, Ray said.

Ray is senior editor of the Tennessee Historical Quarterly. He received his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2003. Between 2004 and 2006 he helped edit four volumes of The Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Retirement Series. His first book, “Middle Tennessee, 1775-1825: Progress and Popular Democracy on the Southwestern Frontier,” was published in 2007.

He is currently editing a collection of essays titled “Before the Volunteer State: New Thoughts on Early Tennessee History, 1540-1800,” which is under contract at the University of Tennessee Press. More broadly, he is deeply engaged in researching issues of sovereignty, loyalty and identity formation in the trans-Appalachian west, 1670-1763.

Sessions of the Provost Lecture Series also can be viewed in real time via online streaming . The sessions also are recorded and can be viewed later on APSU’s iTunes public site .

Other sessions in the Provost Lecture Series also are planned for the academic year. All sessions are from 3:00pm-4:30pm in the MUC, Room 303. To see a schedule of upcoming speakers, visit http://www.apsu.edu/academic-affairs/provost-series.

The Provost Lecture Series seeks to foster a spirit of intellectual and scholarly inquiry among faculty, staff and students. The program will be used as a platform for APSU faculty members who are recent recipients of provost summer grants, who have been awarded faculty development leaves and who have engaged in recent scholarly inquiry during sabbatical leaves.

For more information about the Provost Lecture Series, call Dr. Brian Johnson, assistant vice president of academic affairs at APSU, at 931.221.7992 or email him at johnsonb@apsu.edu.

RELATED ARTICLES

Latest Articles