These lectures are sponsored by the Herbert P. Lefler fund.
Fall 2025 Lefler Lecture
Tuesday, October 21, 5:15 pm
Dr. Jody Benjamin, Associate Professor of History, Howard University
Title: Reading for Texture: West African History at the Intersection of Sartorial Politics and an Emerging Global Cloth Economy
How can historians of the pre-industrial world center the diverse experiences and perspectives of Africans in ways that transcend the colonial archive? What can such a shift in perspective contribute to wider understandings of West African history in a global context? This talk will explore such questions through a discussion of The Texture of Change, a book that examines historical change from Saint Louis, Senegal, to Freetown, Sierra Leone through the development of textile commerce, consumption, and dress during the 18th and 19th centuries. Indigo-dyed and printed cotton, wool, linen, and silk cloths constituted major trade items that linked African producers and consumers to exchange networks that were both regional and global. Shifting focus from the historiographic conventions of the Atlantic slave trade and its impact, this study follows the global cloth trade to account for the broad extent and multiple modes of engagement between Western Africa with Europe, Asia, and the Americas.
Winter 2026 Lefler Lecture
Wednesday, February 18, 2026, 4:30 pm
“More than a student: Ayohka, co-creator of the Cherokee Syllabary, explorer of new educational worlds”
Sequoyah, with the aid of his wife Sallie and daughter Ayohka created and distributed a new technology with vast possibilities for Cherokee educational futures in the 1820s. The Cherokee syllabary, unlike other educational tools, was available to Cherokee men and women, young and old, the reach of which extended far beyond the newer EuroAmerican educational institutions with barriers to entry. Some public memory exists as it relates to the role Ayohka played when she accompanied Sequoyah to the Cherokee national council and helped her father demonstrate the efficacy of the syllabary, but she is often remembered simply as a dutiful student. In this talk, I ask us to see Sequoyah, not as an individual genius, but as a son to Cherokee women, a nephew to Cherokee men facing down violent change, and a father to Ayohka in a time when Cherokee views on fatherhood were in flux. In doing so, Ayohka’s central role and front-row seat in the process to create the syllabary comes into full view. Making Ayohka a central character in Cherokee educational history restores Sequoyah’s place within it, too, and enables us to see the fuller role of women and children played in Cherokee educational history.
Julie L. Reed is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. She recently joined the History and Anthropology departments at the University of Tulsa. Julie’s second book, titled Land, Language, and Women: A Cherokee and American Educational History, released by UNC Press in January 2026, traces 400 years of Cherokee educational history through the lens of Cherokee girls’ classrooms, including Cherokee Mother towns, towns, missions, Cherokee public schools, and Oklahoma public schools. Her first book Serving the Nation (University of Oklahoma) examined the development and implementation of Cherokee social welfare institutions. Reed is currently completing archaeological training at Western Carolina University, supported by her Mellon New Directions Award. Her next project, “Sovereign Kin: A History of the Cherokee Nation,” supported by an NEH Collaborative Award, will be co-authored with historian Rose Stremlau. Her research focuses on the Native South, Indian Territory, and the history of American social welfare and educational history.
Questions? Contact Prof. Victoria Morse, History Department Chair
“History, as nearly no one seems to know, is not merely something to be read. And it does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do.”
— James Baldwin, “The White Man’s Guilt,” Ebony Magazine, August 1965