Professor
Jacquelyn Dowd Hall
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Historian; Educator
Area
Humanities and Arts
Specialty
History
Elected
2011
Professor Jacquelyn Dowd Hall is the Julia Cherry Spurill Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and was one of the founders of American women's history. Her first book was a prize-winning study of the white Southern women's campaign against lynching, but it is her second book that carries the case. Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World (1987), is a classic in the fields of American labor history, gender history, and the history of the American South. Built on a rich foundation of oral interviews and written sources, it remains, twenty years later, a model for the recovery of marginalized historical experiences and voices. The work of a team of authors and researchers, Hall was unquestionably its leading force. She has remained a major figure in the profession: as a writer of prize-winning articles, as president of the Southern Historical Association and of the Organization of American Historians, and as director of the Southern Oral History Program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. President Clinton awarded her the National Humanities Medal in 1999.
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