Amanda Cobb-Greetham

Contact Information

Greenlaw Hall 228, CB #3520
University of North Carolina
Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3520
acg@unc.edu

Cobb-Greetham Bio

Amanda Cobb-Greetham, Ph.D. (Chickasaw), is an award-winning scholar, curator, and professor of Native American studies,  currently serving as the John Shelton Reed Distinguished Professor in Native Southern Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (2024). She previously served the University of Oklahoma as a professor in the Department of Native American Studies.  At OU, her leadership as chair contributed to the elevation of Native American Studies from a program to a department and the founding of the recently endowed Native Nations Center for Research and Community Engagement, which she directed. For her efforts, she received the OU Regents Award for Superior University Service (2023).

She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship (2023) and Harvard Radcliffe Fellowship (2021-2022) for her current research Bright, Golden Haze: Oklahoma/Indian Identity in Myth and Memory, which places Oklahoma history and mythology and the contested cultural erasure of Native Americans at the center of the American story. Cobb-Greetham has received significant recognition for her previous scholarship, winning the American Book Award for Listening to Our Grandmothers’ Stories: The Bloomfield Academy for Chickasaw Females. In addition, she is the co-editor of The National Museum of the American Indian: Critical Conversations with Amy Lonetree. She has published numerous articles in peer-reviewed journals and served as the editor of American Indian Quarterly, a leading journal of Native American studies, for nine years.

From 2007 to 2012, she served her tribe, the Chickasaw Nation, as the Administrator of the Division of History and Culture. During her tenure, she was instrumental in launching the state-of-the-art Chickasaw Cultural Center in Sulphur, OK and directed the museums, archives, language programs, as well as the Chickasaw Press. The Chickasaw Press, the first tribal publishing house of its kind, received the Harvard Award for Excellence in Tribal Self-Governance under her guidance. She received the Chickasaw Nation’s prestigious Dynamic Woman Award, (2018) and has been inducted into the Chickasaw Hall of Fame (2023).

She serves on the Board of Governors for the Harvard Honoring Nations project. She served on the Board of Trustees of the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian for six years (Vice Chair 2019-2021). She was the founding President of The Auntie Project, Native Women of Service, a 501 (c) 3, nonprofit organization (2019-2023).