Aubrey Lauersdorf

Aubrey Lauersdorf is a specialist in North American borderlands and the Native South in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Her current book project is titled Apalachee Coast: Indigenous Power in the Colonial Gulf South. It shows how the Apalachees, an Indigenous polity in the modern-day Florida panhandle, leveraged their relationships with the Spanish and their Indigenous neighbors to become the major power in the Gulf South between 1527 and 1685. Dr. Lauersdorf has also published her work in the Florida Historical Quarterly and in two forthcoming edited collections. Her research has been supported by the Huntington Library, the Center for the Study of the American South, and the University of Florida Libraries.

Dr. Lauersdorf received a B.A. in History and Anthropology from the University of Wisconsin followed by an M.A. and Ph.D. in History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Before coming to FSU, she worked as an Assistant Professor of History at Auburn University. Dr. Lauersdorf also serves as the Book Review Editor (North America) for the journal Ethnohistory.

At FSU, Dr. Lauersdorf is excited to offer various courses on Indigenous and early American history, including: “The Native South: An Indigenous History of the American South,” “The American West: History, Myth, & Memory” “Encounters in Vast Early America,” “Women & Gender in Early North America,” and “Indigenous Tallahassee.”