Associate Professor
My current research, forthcoming from the University of Georgia Press, represents a momentary departure from the Civil War centred projects. Currently and tentatively titled "Suns, Moons, Bells, and Clocks: Native Americans and Time," the project investigates the evolution of Native American time systems. In short, how did Indians come to own timepieces and how did they incorporate mechanical time into their understanding and use of time. This project represents a departure from traditional studies of Native American cultures and societies. It is an unconventional attempt to bind together ostensibly discrete historiographies as well as different aspects of Native-American interactions with Europeans and later Americans in order to investigate how Native-Americans understood and used time and how those understandings and usages evolved over time to include, by the early 20th century, clocks and watches. In essence, how Native-Americans became clock conscious, and thus modern, in a world that refused to see them as such.
Publications:
Books
Cheryl Wells, ed. A Surgeon in the Army of the Potomac by Francis M. Wafer (Montreal: McGill-Queen's Press, 2008)
Cheryl Wells, Civil War Time: Temporality and Identity in America, 1861-1865 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005)
