Faculty and Staff

Faculty  |  Staff

Faculty

J. Brent Morris will serve as Project Director for the Summer Institute. Dr. Morris is Professor of History and Founding Director of the Institute for the Study of the Reconstruction Era at the University of South Carolina Beaufort. He received his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 2010, and has been awarded recent grants or fellowships from the NEH, Association for Documentary Editing, the USC Institute for Southern Studies, the USC Institute for African American Research, Cornell University, Oberlin College, the Sea Islands Institute, and the New York Humanities Council. His book Oberlin, Hotbed of Abolitionism: College, Community, and the Fight for Freedom and Equality in Antebellum America was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2014. He is also the author of Yes Lord I Know the Road: A Documentary History of African Americans in South Carolina, 1526-2008, (USC Press, 2017). Brent was the 2010 recipient of the South Carolina Historical Society's Malcolm C. Clark Award, the 2015 Henry Howe Award of the Ohio Genealogical Society, and is the recipient of the 2015-2016 University of South Carolina Breakthrough Star for Research and Scholarship award.

Michael Allen is National Park Service Gullah/Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor Coordinator. Michael Allen began his public career as a Cooperative Education Student with the National Park Service in 1980. Mr. Allen has served as a Park Ranger and is now the Community Partnership Specialist for Fort Sumter National Monument and Charles Pinckney National Historic Site. He played a major role in the National Park Service's Gullah-Geechee Special Resource Study, which examined the feasibility and suitability of establishing educational centers along the southeast coast as well as determining ways to increase interpretation and preservation of the Gullah/Geechee culture and history.
In October 2007, Mr. Allen was instrumental in the establishment of the Gullah Geechee Heritage Commission. He provided inspiration and guidance to ensure that the nine year journey became a reality. He continues to provide hope, opportunity and support to grass root organizations in the wider Gullah Geechee Community. Finally Michael's motto is, "to understand the present and move toward the future, you must first know and accept your past.

David W Blight is a teacher, scholar and public historian. At Yale University he is Sterling Professor of History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition.
Blight works in many capacities in the world of public history, including on boards of museums and historical societies, and as a member of a small team of advisors to the 9/11 Memorial and Museum team of curators. For that institution he wrote the recently published essay, “Will It Rise: September 11 in American Memory.” In 2012, Blight was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and delivered an induction address, “The Pleasure and Pain of History.”
Blight’s newest book is a biography of Frederick Douglass. Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for History, in addition to many otherawards. His other recent books include annotated editions, with introductory essay, of Frederick Douglass’s second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom (Yale Univ. Press, 2013), Robert Penn Warren’s Who Speaks for the Negro, (Yale Univ. Press, 2014), and the monograph, American Oracle: The Civil War in the Civil Rights Era (Harvard University Press, published August 2011), which received the 2012 Anisfield-Wolf Award for best book in non-fiction on racism and human diversity. American Oracle is an intellectual history of Civil War memory, rooted in the work of Robert Penn Warren, Bruce Catton, Edmund Wilson, and James Baldwin. Blight is also the author of A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including their Narratives of Emancipation, (Harcourt, 2007), paperback in 2009. Blight is also the author of Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Harvard University Press, 2001), which received eight book awards, including the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize as well as four awards from the Organization of American Historians, including the Merle Curti prizes for both intellectual and social history.
Blight is also a frequent book reviewer for the New York Times, Washington Post Book World, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Boston Globe, Slate.com and other newspapers, and has written many articles on abolitionism, American historical memory, and African American intellectual and cultural history. He is one of the authors of the bestselling American history textbook for the college level, A People and a Nation (Cengage). He is also series advisor and editor for the Bedford Books series in American History and Culture, a popular series of teaching books for the college level. Blight lectures widely in the US and around the world on the Civil War and Reconstruction, race relations, Douglass, Du Bois, and problems in public history and American historical memory. He teaches summer institutes for secondary teachers and for park rangers and historians in the National Park Service, devoting a good deal of time to these and many other public history initiatives.

Orville Vernon Burton is Creativity Professor of Humanities, Professor of History, Sociology, and Computer Science at Clemson University, and the Director of the Clemson CyberInstitute. From 2008-2010, he was the Burroughs Distinguished Professor of Southern History and Culture at Coastal Carolina University. He was the founding Director of the Institute for Computing in Humanities, Arts, and Social Science (I CHASS) at the University of Illinois, where he is emeritus University Distinguished Teacher/Scholar, University Scholar, and Professor of History, African American Studies, and Sociology. At the University of Illinois, he continues to chair the I-CHASS advisory board and is also a Senior Research Scientist at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) where he served as Associate Director for Humanities and Social Sciences from 2002-2010. Burton serves as vice-chair of the Board of Directors of the Congressional National Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Foundation. In 2007 the Illinois State legislature honored him with a special resolution for his contributions as a scholar, teacher, and citizen of Illinois. A recognized expert on race relations and the American South, and a leader in Digital Humanities, Burton is often invited to present lectures, conduct workshops, and consult with colleges, universities, and granting agencies.
Burton is a prolific author and scholar (twenty authored or edited books and more than two hundred articles); and author or director of numerous digital humanities projects. The Age of Lincoln (2007) won the Chicago Tribune Heartland Literary Award for Nonfiction and was selected for Book of the Month Club, History Book Club, and Military Book Club. One reviewer proclaimed, “If the Civil War era was America's ‘Iliad,’ then historian Orville Vernon Burton is our latest Homer.” The book was featured at sessions of the annual meetings of African American History and Life Association, the Social Science History Association, the Southern Intellectual History Circle, and the latter was the basis for a forum published in The Journal of the Historical Society. His In My Father’s House Are Many Mansions: Family and Community in Edgefield, South Carolina (1985) was featured at sessions of the Southern Historical Association and the Social Science History Association annual meetings. The Age of Lincoln and In My Fathers’ House were nominated for Pulitzers. His most recent book, is Penn Center: A History Preserved (2014).
Recognized for his teaching, Burton was selected nationwide as the 1999 U.S. Research and Doctoral University Professor of the Year (presented by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education). In 2004 he received the American Historical Association’s Eugene Asher Distinguished Teaching Prize. At the University of Illinois he won teaching awards at the department, school, college, and campus levels. He was the recipient of the 2001-2002 Graduate College Outstanding Mentor Award and received the 2006 Campus Award for Excellence in Public Engagement from the University of Illinois. He was appointed an Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer for 2004-16.
Burton's research and teaching interests include the American South, especially race relations and community, and the intersection of humanities and social sciences. He has served as president of the Southern Historical Association and of the Agricultural History Society. He was elected to honorary life membership in BrANCH (British American Nineteenth-Century Historians). Among his honors are fellowships and grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Pew Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the National Humanities Center, the U.S. Department of Education, National Park Service, and the Carnegie Foundation. He was a Pew National Fellow Carnegie Scholar for 2000-2001. He was elected to the Society of American Historians and was one of ten historians selected to contribute to the Presidential Inaugural Portfolio (January 21, 2013) by the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies.

Emory Campbell is a renowned community leader among the Gullah people of the Lowcountry. Campbell was born and raised on Hilton Head Island, South Carolina before that island — now an internationally famous resort area — was connected to the mainland by a bridge. Campbell would later earn a master's degree in environmental engineering from Tufts University in Boston.
Campbell began his career in the 1970s as a community development activist, working to implement public health measures in impoverished rural areas and to preserve traditional Gullah communities threatened by out-of-control resort development on the Sea Islands. Later, as the Executive Director of Penn Center, Inc. on St. Helena Island, South Carolina Campbell helped lead the movement to preserve Gullah culture and make Gullah people in the rural areas more aware of the importance of their uniquely rich African cultural heritage. Campbell was a member of the committee that translated the New Testament into the Gullah language.
Beginning in the 1980s, Campbell helped spearhead the efforts to reestablish the family connection between the Gullah people and the West African nation of Sierra Leone. Campbell hosted Sierra Leone's President Joseph Saidu Momoh for the "Gullah Reunion" at Penn Center in 1988, and led the historic "Gullah Homecoming" to Sierra Leone in 1989. The Sierra Leoneans made Campbell an honorary paramount chief with the royal title of Kpaa Kori I. These events are chronicled in the SCETV documentary video "Family Across the Sea" (1990).
In 2005, Campbell received the Carter G. Woodson Memorial Award from the National Education Association for his lifelong work preserving Gullah heritage, the environment, and improving the Gullah community's living conditions. In 2008 Mr. Campbell was elected Chairman of the Gullah-Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor Commission, an organization empowered by the U.S. Congress to develop a program to commemorate Gullah culture in the low country region from Wilmington, North Carolina to Jacksonville, Florida. Campbell is author of Gullah Cultural Legacies (2008), and the director of Gullah Heritage Consulting Services based on Hilton Head Island, South Carolina.

Melissa L. Cooper specializes in African American cultural and intellectual history, and the history of the African Diaspora. Cooper's book, Making Gullah: A History of Sapelo Islanders, Race, and the American Imagination (University of North Carolina Press, 2017) is an intellectual and cultural history that examines the emergence of "the Gullah" in scholarly and popular works during the 1920s and the 1930s. Using Sapelo Island, Georgia as a case study, Cooper's manuscript explores the forces that inspired interest in black southerners’ African heritage during the period, and also looks at the late twentieth, and twenty-first century legacies of the works that first made Sapelo Islanders famous. She is the author of Instructor's Resource Manual--Freedom on My Mind: A History of African Americans with Documents (Bedford/St. Martin's Press, 2013) and a contributor to Race and Retail: Consumption Across the Color Line (Rutgers University Press, 2015).

Minuette Floyd is an art educator at USC who will serve as curator of exhibits and assist and guide participants with a project during the visit to Sapelo Island Georgia. Floyd is an associate professor of art education and Director of the Young Artist’s Workshop at the University of South Carolina School of Visual Art and Design. She teaches both graduate and undergraduate courses which assist in the preparation of art education majors to become teachers in Pre-Kindergarten through Twelfth grade. Her research interests focus on multicultural art education, interdisciplinary art instruction, and documentation of folk traditions.
She is a graduate of the Riley Diversity Leadership Institute (Midlands Class V, 2012) sponsored by Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina. Awards include the Dr. Deborah Smith Hoffman Mentor Award (2012), the J. Eugene Grigsby Award (2010), the Mac Arthur Goodwin Award (2009), Living the Legacy Award given by the National Council of Negro Women, (2009), National Outstanding Performance in Higher Education Award (2003), the Mary J. Rouse Award for Art Education (2002), and the South Carolina Art Education Association Award for Art Education (2001). She is the past chair of the Committee on Multiethnic Concerns, an affiliate of the National Art Education Association. She serves on the steering committee of the Arts in the Basic Curriculum Project, the board of the South Carolina Alliance for Art Education, and the Education Advisory Committee at the Columbia Museum of Art.
She received two Fulbright Hays Awards to travel and study in both Senegal (2009) and South Africa (2002). Additionally, grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the South Carolina Humanities Council, and the South Carolina Arts Commission enabled her to compile a photographic documentary based on African-American Camp Meeting Traditions.
This interactive exhibition, consists of 42 large black and white photographs, is scheduled to be shown at the Avery Center in Charleston, SC, the Ritz Museum and Theatre in Jacksonville, Florida, and the Martha’s Vineyard History Museum in 2015-2016. The exhibit was displayed at the Charlotte Museum of History in North Carolina and the Moore Methodist Center at St.Simon’s Island, Georgia in 2010, and the McKissick Museum at the University of South Carolina in 2008.
Her book entitled A Place to Worship: Carolina Camp Meetings, An African-American Tradition will be published through the University of South Carolina Press.

Daisy Martin is a Lead Scholar on finding and teaching with primary source documents. Professor Martin is Director of History Performance Assessment at the Stanford Center for Assessment, Learning, and Equity [SCALE] and teaches in the Stanford University and UC Santa Cruz’s Teacher Educator Programs. Martin is a former high school history and civics teacher who served as co-director of the Stanford History Education Group. She earned her PhD in Curriculum and Teacher Education in History and Social Science Education in 2005 with a dissertation entitled "Teaching for Historical Thinking: Teacher Conceptions, Practices, and Constraints." She recently co-directed Historical Thinking Matters, serves as teaching consultant with professional development efforts organized by the Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project, and teaches history teacher-candidates. She has worked with elementary, middle, and high school teachers in TAH grants in California, Nebraska, Ohio, and Tennessee, and led professional development workshops funded by NEH, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, and the Teachers for a New Era project at Stanford. Current projects include creating classroom ready resources for teaching historical problems and researching teacher practices and conceptions relevant to this kind of teaching. Her publications include articles in The History Teacher and Educational Leadership.

Bernard Powers has served as Department Chair, Associate Chair and as Director of the M.A. History Program at the College of Charleston. He has published numerous works on African American social and cultural evolution. His major work is Black Charlestonians: A Social History 1822-1885, (University of Arkansas Press,1994). which won a Choice Award for Best Academic Books.
He was associate editor for the The South Carolina Encyclopedia (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina, 2006).
He serves as chief historian on the strategic plan for the International African American Museum (Charleston) and as evaluator for the African American Focus Tours at Drayton Hall Plantation for the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
His article "Community Evolution and Race Relations in Reconstruction Charleston, S.C." was selected as one of the "Three Articles From A Century of Excellence" Centennial Volume 1900-2000 of The South Carolina Historical Magazine.

Heather Cox Richardson is professor of history at Boston College. Previously professor of history at the University of Massachusetts, she received her Ph.D. in 1992 from Harvard’s Program in the History of American Civilization.
Heather Richardson is committed to bridging the gap between professional historians and the public. She has appeared on a Bill Moyers documentary, “The Chinese in America” and works with two educational consulting firms to train secondary school teachers and conduct public historical seminars. She reviews books for popular media like the Chicago Tribune as well as a wide range of scholarly journals.
Her most recent book, Wounded Knee: Party Politics and the Road to an American Massacre was published by Basic Books. She also is the author of West from Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America after the Civil War, which was published by Yale University Press and explores the ways in which a popular conflict over race and labor combined in the postwar years with Westward expansion and a novel kind of women’s activism. Her earlier books include The Greatest Nation of the Earth: Republican Economic Policies During the Civil War and The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post-Civil War North, 1865-1901, both published by Harvard University Press.

Lawrence Rowland is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History for the University of South Carolina Beaufort and previously held roles with the University as Professor of History and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, and is a past president of the South Carolina Historical Society. He holds a bachelors of arts from Hamilton College (New York), and both a masters and doctorate from the University of South Carolina. Professor Rowland is author of numerous articles and book reviews on South Carolina and Sea Island history. He is the author of The History of Beaufort County, South Carolina, Vol. I, 1514-1861, with Alexander Moore and George C. Rogers, Jr., 1996. (1996), Window on the Atlantic: The Rise and Fall of Santa Elena, South Carolina Spanish City (1990), The Civil War in South Carolina: Selections from the South Carolina Historical Magazine, Co-editor with Stephen G. Hoffius, (2011), and The History of Beaufort County, South Carolina, Vol. II and Vol. III, 1861-1990, with Stephen R. Wise and Gerhard Spieler (2015).

Patricia Sullivan is Professor of History at the University of South Carolina. She specializes in modern United States history, with an emphasis on African American history, race relations, and the history of the Civil Rights Movement. Professor Sullivan teaches courses in twentieth century U.S. history. Areas of interest include African American history; the South since the Civil War; race, reform and politics in the United States; and the history of the Civil Rights Movement. She teaches graduate courses on modern American history, African American history and on civil rights struggles in the twentieth century. Her most recent book, Lift Every Voice: The NAACP and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement, is the first history of the formative decades of the nation's oldest civil rights organization. Henry Louis Gates Jr. described the book as "a major contribution to our understanding of the political and cultural history of African Americans-indeed of America itself." Other books include: Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era; Freedom Writer: Virginia Foster Durr, Letters from the Civil Rights Years; New Directions in Civil Rights Studies, co-edited with Armstead L. Robinson, and Civil Rights in the United States, a 2-volume encyclopedia, coedited with Waldo E. Martin Jr. She and Waldo Martin are editors of the John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture, published by the University of North Carolina Press. Since 1997, Professor Sullivan has codirected an NEH Summer Institute at Harvard's W.E.B. Du Bois Institute with Waldo Martin on "Teaching the History of the Civil Rights Movement."

Stephen Wise is the director of the Parris Island Museum and the Cultural Resources Manager for the Marine Corps Recruit Depot, Parris Island. A native of Toledo, Ohio, Dr. Wise received his bachelor degree from Wittenberg University and a master's degree from Bowling Green State University. He received his doctorate at the University of South Carolina. He has written a number of works including Lifeline of the Confederacy: Blockade Running During the Civil War and Gate of Hell: The Campaign for Charleston Harbor 1863. Since 1984 he has taught for the University of South Carolina Beaufort's military program as an adjunct professor. He has appeared on the Arts and Entertainment Channel, the History Channel and the Discovery Channel as well as appearing in various British Broadcasting Company and South Carolina Education Television and Radio productions. He wrote the screen narrative for the Gilded Age Productions film American Iliad: The Siege of Charleston, a docufilm on the Civil War in the Charleston area. Dr. Wise served on the faculty for Penn Center's Gullah Institute and is an advisor to the South Carolina Battleground Preservation Trust. He is currently serving on the editorial board for the South Carolina Historical Magazine. His most recent work written in conjunction with Dr. Lawrence Rowland is Rebellion, Reconstruction and Redemption: The History of Beaufort Count 1861-1893 which was published in the summer of 2015 by the University of South Carolina Press.

Peter H. Wood is professor emeritus of history at Duke University, where he taught for more than 30 years. He earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University and is a Rhodes Scholar. Wood is widely recognized as a leading scholar of American race and slavery, with his landmark book Black Majority (1974) recognized as a classic in the field. He is the author of numerous other books, including Strange New Land: Africans in Colonial America (2003), Weathering the Storm: Inside Winslow Homer's 'Gulf Stream (2004), and Winslow Homer's Images of Blacks: The Civil War and Reconstruction Years (with Karen Dalton, 1988). He has appeared in several PBS programs including "Africans in America" (1998) and "Free to Dance" (2001). In 2011, he received the Eugene Asher Distinguished Teaching Award from the American Historical Association for outstanding teaching and advocacy for history teaching.

Staff

Thomas Thurston will serve as Project Advisor/Teacher Liaison. He is the Director of Education at the Yale Gilder Lehrman Center, holds a B.A. in American Studies from the University of California at Santa Cruz and an MPhl in American Studies from Yale University. Prior to coming to the Gilder Lehrman Center he served as the Project Director of the New Deal Network, an educational website developed by the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute and the Institute for Learning Technologies at Teachers College, Columbia University. For his work developing the New Deal Network he received the first annual award for “Best Multimedia Resource” from the American Association for History and Computing and a “Best of the Humanities on the Web” citation from the National Endowment for the Humanities.Tom has led week-long NEH workshops for K-12 teachers, has acted as a consulting historian for several Teaching American History programs, and has served as a curriculum developer for WNET’s Educational Technologies Department, including the documentary series “The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow” and “Slavery and the Making of America.” In his role for the summer institute he will guide the teachers though their visual essay projects and lesson plans, and provide content support and links to resources.

Lemuel Watson will serve as Institute Curator ofProfessional Development. He is Dean of the College of Education at the University of South Carolina and Professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policies. Dr. Watson is the former the Executive Director of the Center for P–20 Engagement and Dean of the College of Education at Northern Illinois University; he is also the former Dean for the division of Academic Support at Heartland College. He is an alumni of the Darla Moore School of Business at USC. He completed his master’s degree at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana and a doctorate degree in higher education and policy from Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. His career spans across various divisions in educational organizations where he has been a teacher, faculty, policy analyst, and administrator.