Jessie Wilkerson
is a writer, historian, and associate professor of history at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Her first book, To Live Here, You Have to Fight: How Women Led Appalachian Movements for Social Justice, was published by University of Illinois Press in January 2019, in the Working Class in American History Series. It was awarded the H.L. Mitchell Prize in recognition of a distinguished book concerning the history of the southern working class and honorable mention by the Philip Taft Labor History Book Award. She is currently working on two books, They’ll Never Keep Us Down: A Women’s History of Appalachia (under contract with Simon & Schuster) and In Sisterhood, In Struggle: Feminisms in the American South (under contract with UNC Press). In 2021, she was named a Carnegie Fellow.
photo by Pableaux Johnson
FACULTY PAGE
Department of History, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
NEWS
In the fall of 2025, Jessie is joining the history department at the University of Tennessee, where she will be offering courses in Appalachian and modern U.S. history and public history.
Contact
jwilker4@utk.edu