Skip to main content

Tai Edwards

Tai Edwards PhD

Associate Professor, history
Photo of this person

Tai S. Edwards – Associate Professor of History (Ph.D. University of Kansas, M.A. George Mason University, B.S. University of Kansas) and Director of JCCC’s Kansas Studies Institute. Dr. Edwards’ research interests include North American colonization, U.S. imperialism, Indigenous peoples, gender, and environmental history. Her book, Osage Women and Empire: Gender and Power (University Press of Kansas, 2018) examined how Osage gender complementarity was central to the rise of an Osage “empire” in the 18th century and in resisting U.S. colonization in the 19th century. Her recent Edgar Langsdorf Award-winning article, “Disruption and Disease: The Osage Struggle to Survive in the Nineteenth-Century Trans-Missouri West,” demonstrated how U.S. federal policy and settler invasion produced the disruptions necessary for epidemic disease to decimate the Osage population (see Kansas History, vol. 36, no. 4, Winter 2013/2014). Along with Paul Kelton, she has an article, “Germs, Genocides, and America’s Indigenous Peoples” in press with the Journal of American History and she has contributed a chapter, “The ‘Virgin’ Soil Thesis Cover-Up: Teaching Indigenous Demographic Collapse” in Understanding and Teaching Native American History, Kristofer Ray and Brady DeSanti, eds. (in progress with University of Wisconsin Press). She has also received the JCCC’s BNSF Railway Faculty Achievement Award (2018), College Scholar (2018), and Publication Award (2019).