Rate My Professor John Bowes

Dr. John P. Bowes serves as Associate Dean of the College of Letters, Arts, and Social Sciences and Professor of History at Eastern Kentucky University, where he joined the History Department as Assistant Professor in 2006 and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2011. His academic career includes an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in Native American Studies at Dartmouth College from 2004 to 2006 and a lectureship at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2004. Bowes holds a B.A. in History from Yale University (1995, cum laude with Distinction in History), an M.A. from UCLA (1999), and a Ph.D. from UCLA's Department of History (2003), focusing on U.S. history.

Bowes specializes in Native American history and the history of the American West, particularly northern and eastern Indian removal. He is the author of Land Too Good for Indians: Northern Indian Removal (University of Oklahoma Press, 2016), Exiles and Pioneers: Eastern Indians in the Trans-Mississippi West (Cambridge University Press, 2007), The History and Culture of Native Americans: The Choctaw (Chelsea House Publishers, 2010), The Trail of Tears: Removal in the South (Chelsea House Publishers, 2007), and Black Hawk and the War of 1832: Removal in the North (Chelsea House Publishers, 2007). His peer-reviewed articles include “The Gnadenhutten Effect: Moravian Converts and the Search for Safety in the Canadian Borderlands” (Michigan Historical Review, 2008), and he has contributed chapters such as “U.S. Expansion and Its Consequences, 1815–1890” to the Oxford Handbook of American Indian History. Bowes has received the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend (2010), American Philosophical Society Phillips Fund for Native American Research Grant (2011), and Eastern Kentucky University College of Arts and Sciences’ Excellence in Research and Creative Activities Award (2010-2011), along with several EKU research grants. He serves as Book Review Editor for Ethnohistory, Commissioner on the Kentucky Native American Heritage Commission, District Coordinator for Kentucky’s National History Day Competition, and expert witness for the Saginaw Chippewa Tribe of Michigan and Bois Forte Band of Chippewa Indians.