Dr. Alexa S. Cawley, an Assistant Professor of History at Delaware State University, has long been fascinated both with history and the fine art of teaching it to others. First earning a B.A. in history at Kenyon College, Dr. Cawley then spent three years in Scotland studying at the University of Edinburgh where she earned a Master of Letters in British History.  Briefly toying with a more profitable field such as investment research, she soon recognized the error of her ways and became a high school history and English teacher.  Teaching at the high school level for five years, she also earned a Master of Science in Education from Johns Hopkins University, where she specialized in Teacher Leadership and Professional Development.  Through her Masters’ thesis she developed a teacher mentoring program, pairing teachers in different specialties in supportive teams, enabling teachers to develop and pursue goals for their own teaching with non-threatening input from their peers.

Dr. Cawley has a Ph.D. in American history from American University.  Her research fields of interest include colonial Chesapeake society and labor history.  Her doctoral dissertation examined the development of Kent County, Maryland from its founding in 1631 to 1676, tracing settlement patterns in households and the community and analyzing interaction among these early founders of Maryland’s Eastern Shore.  Research on indentured servitude and the development of slavery augment these earlier studies.

Dr. Cawley has also been engaged in Teaching American History programs for the past five years, first as a member of the Steering Committee for Washington’s Legacy Project, a T.A.H. grant based in Maryland.  She taught a graduate course entitled “Teaching and Learning American History: Content, Learning Theory, and Pedagogy” at Washington College.  A primary goal of that course was to show teachers how to utilize local history and local history resources to teach the broader issues of American history.  She was also Co-Director of “Chesapeake Journey: From Slavery to Freedom” a T.A.H. summer institute sponsored by the Washington’s Legacy Project and the C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience.  In that institute teachers and college students spent eight days travelling around the Chesapeake Bay studying the colonial development of slavery and challenges to the “peculiar institution” in the Mid-Atlantic region.

More recently Dr. Cawley has worked with A.I.H.E. both as a historian and a Master Teacher.  Presenting since the fall of 2007, she was included in the first distance learning webcast offered by A.I.H.E., working with teachers simultaneously in California, Oklahoma, and the Virgin Islands.  She also has two lectures, on indentured servitude and slavery, posted on Cicero.com.

Dr. Cawley’s published works include “‘To go . . . and make his peace with him’: Community and Friendship in Seventeenth-Century Kent County”, Maryland Historical Magazine, Summer, 2006, and “A Passionate Affair: The Master-Servant Relationship in Seventeenth-Century Maryland” The Historian, 61:4, Summer 1999.  She co-edited a resource book based on Washington’s Legacy Project entitled “History at Home: Lesson Plans.”  Her dissertation database can be accessed through DelmarvaSettlers.org. at <http://nabbhistory.salisbury.edu/dbs/kentcourt/>.  Dr. Cawley is also the Treasurer of the Historical Society of Kent County, Maryland, and has worked with local historical organizations and historic sites developing interpretive plans and expanding their programs.  She lives in Chestertown, Maryland, with her husband and two sons.