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Sharlotte Neely is an American anthropologist who has conducted extensive research on Native North Americans, especially the Cherokee Indians. Her topics of study include ethnicity, indigenousness, gender roles, social organization, the origins of human behavior and institutions, and ethnohistory.

Professional Career

Dr. Neely earned her BA degree in anthropology from Georgia State University in 1970 and her MA (1971) and PhD (1976) degrees in anthropology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. At UNC-CH she was a student of anthropologist John J. Honigmann. She was also greatly influenced by Norwegian anthropologist Fredrik Barth.

Among her dozens of publications is the well reviewed book, Snowbird Cherokees: People of Persistence. Originally published in 1991, Snowbird Cherokees has since inspired an award winning documentary film of the same name and remains the only ethnographic study of Snowbird, North Carolina, a remote mountain community of Cherokees who are regarded as simultaneously the most traditional and the most adaptive members of the entire tribe. In 2021 the 30th anniversary edition of Snowbird Cherokees was published with a foreword by Trey Adcock, PhD, an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation (Oklahoma) and Gilliam Jackson, an enrolled member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (EBCI, North Carolina).

In having Adcock and Jackson write the foreword to Snowbird Cherokees, Dr. Neely continued a tradition begun with her by anthropologist John Gulick when he asked Dr. Neely, then just a graduate student starting her MA thesis research on Cherokee education, to write an epilogue to his famous book, Cherokees at the Crossroads. The book was based on a huge late 1950s project through UNC-CH’s Institute for Research in Social Science by Gulick and his UNC-CH and other graduate students to study the EBCI, and Gulick thought the book was dated. So he asked Dr. Neely to write an epilogue which she did.

Dr. Neely’s very first publication was in the  American Anthropologist, while still a graduate student. Her most recent is the book, Native Nations: The Survival of Indigenous Peoples, co-edited with Douglas W. Hume. As a lover of science fiction, she is the author, as Sharlotte Donnelly, of the sci fi novel, Kasker.

She is a Past President of Anthropologists and Sociologists of Kentucky and retired after 43 years as Professor Emerita of Anthropology at Northern Kentucky University. While at NKU she won the Outstanding Professor Award, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Service Award, and the NKU Alumni Association’s Strongest Influence Award and served as both Anthropology Coordinator and Native American Studies Director. Under her leadership NKU had more than 100 anthropology majors for many years, more anthropology majors than any other college or university in both the Commonwealth of Kentucky and the Ohio Valley region.

Personal Life

Dr. Neely was born Sharlotte Kathleen Neely on August 13, 1948 in Savannah, Georgia, the only child of Kathleen Bell Neely and Joseph Bowden Neely. After an abusive first marriage, she married attorney and fellow anthropologist Thomas Christian Donnelly on June 21, 1980 in Cincinnati, Ohio.

They are the parents of one child, Mary Kathleen Bridgette Donnelly, and grandparents of one grandchild, Mary Kathleen Quinn Donnelly, and several foster grandchildren.

She and her husband Tom and their dogs and cats reside in Cincinnati, Ohio. The family is Catholic.