POCAHONTAS EXPERT TO SPEAK FEB. 8 AT ODU

Pocahontas biographer Camilla Townsend, associate professor of history at Rutgers University, will speak about Native American women Thursday, Feb. 8 at Old Dominion University.

The lecture, "Pocahontas as Broker: Risks and Rewards for Native Women at Contact," will be held at 8 p.m. in the Mills Godwin Jr. Building. Free and open to the public, the event is part of the Jamestown 2007 commemoration.

Townsend is the author of "Pocahontas and the Powhatan Dilemma." Her research interests include relations between the indigenous and Europeans throughout the Americas and she teaches courses in Native American history and Native American women. She has also conducted research in Nahuatl, the Aztec language, and colonial Mexican native language.

In addition to "Pocahontas," Townsend is the author of "'What in the World Have You Done to Me, My Lover?' Sex, Servitude and Politics among the Pre-Conquest Nahuas as seen in the Cantares Mexicanos," "Malintzin's Choices: An Indian Woman in the Conquest of Mexico," "Burying the White Gods: New Perspectives on the Conquest of Mexico," and "Tales of Two Cities: Race and Economic Culture in Early Republican North and South America."

She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship and an American Philosophical Society Franklin Grant, and was a finalist in the Library of Virginia Non-fiction Literary Award.