Helen Hornbeck Tanner Collegiate Professor
About
Greg Dowd (on leave, 2025-2026) is past Associate Dean for the Humanities, past chair of the Department of American Culture (AC) and past director of the AC Native American Studies program. He studies the past. He has published several books and many articles on essays on the history of Eastern North America from the sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. His scholarly interests include the study of rumor, religion, law, and those other places where ideas and popular action meet. He has taught history at the University of Notre Dame, the University of Connecticut, and the University of the Witwatersrand (in Johannesburg, South Africa). He has held fellowships at the University of Michigan’s Institute for the Humanities, the Newberry Library (Chicago), and the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. He wrote an expert witness report and gave professional testimony in a deposition for tribes in a treaty-rights case in Michigan. He received his Ph.D. in History at Princeton University (1986) and his B.A. in History at the University of Connecticut (1978).
Research Area(s):
- Early American History
- Native American Studies
- British Settler Colonies and Indigenous Peoples, 1750-1825
Affiliations:
Core Faculty: Program in Native American Studies (NAS)
Professor Dowd holds a joint appointment in the Departments of American Culture (AC) and History
