Curriculum Vitae
Personal Website
Education
BA Rhodes College, 1965
PhD Columbia University, 1974
Research Interests
Jacquelyn Dowd Hall is Julia Cherry Spruill Professor Emeritus at UNC-Chapel Hill and founding director of the university’s Southern Oral History Program. She is past president of the Organization of American Historians and the Southern Historical Association and founding president of the Labor and Working Class History Association. Her books and articles include Revolt Against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women’s Campaign Against Lynching (1979, 1993), winner of the Francis B. Simkins and the Lillian Smith Awards; Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World (1987, 2000), winner of the Albert J. Beveridge Award, the Merle Curti Award, and the Philip Taft Labor History Prize; and “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History (2005), which challenged the myth that the movement was a short, successful bid to overcome segregation in the Jim Crow South. She has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Radcliffe Center for Advanced Study, the National Humanities Center, and other institutions. She was elected to the Society of American Historians in 1990 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the nation's most prestigious honorary societies, in 2011. She received UNC’s Distinguished Teaching Award for Post-Baccalaureate Instruction in 1997. In 1999, she was awarded a National Humanities Medal for her efforts to deepen the nation’s engagement with the humanities by "recording history through the lives of ordinary people, and, in so doing, for making history." In 2013, she received the Mary Turner Lane Award for outstanding contributions to the lives of women at UNC-Chapel Hill. In 2015, she received the Award for Distinguished Service to Labor and Working-Class History from the Labor and Working-Class History Association and the Stephen E. Ambrose Oral History Award.
Awards for her most recent book, Sisters and Rebels: A Struggle for the Soul of America (2019), include the 2020 PEN America/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography; the Summersell Prize for the best book on the history of the American South; the PROSE Award from the Association of American Publishers for outstanding work by a trade press; the Bell Award from the Georgia Historical Society for the best book in Georgia history; the Charles S. Sydnor Award from the Southern Historical Association for the best book in southern history (co-winner); the Julia Cherry Spruill Prize from the Southern Association of Women Historians for the best book in southern women’s history (co-winner); and the Willie Lee Rose Prize from the Southern Association of Women Historians for the best book on any topic in southern history written by a woman (co-winner). It was also a finalist for the Plutarch Award from Biographers International. Also in 2020, she and UNC-alumnus Bruce Baker coedited, introduced, and published Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin, Eli Hill: A Novel of Reconstruction (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2020).