Academic Appointment

2025-, Associate Professor, Department of History, University of Tennessee, Knoxville

2020-2025, Associate Professor and Stuart and Joyce Robbins Chair, Department of History, West Virginia University

2014-2020, Assistant Professor, Arch Dalrymple III Department of History and Center for the Study of Southern Culture, University of Mississippi

Education

Ph.D., History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2014. 

M.A., Women’s History, Sarah Lawrence College, 2006.

B.A., English, Carson-Newman College, 2003.

Selected Publications   

To Live Here, You Have To Fight: How Women Led Appalachian Movements for Social Justice, published in The Working Class in American History Series (University of Illinois Press, 2019). Winner of the H.L. Mitchell Award from the Southern Historical Association. Received Honorable Mention from the Philip Taft Prize in Labor and Working-Class History and was a finalist for the OAH Mary Nickliss Prize in U.S. Women’s and/or Gender History.

Book Chapters

“Oral History and Testimony in Histories of Women, Gender, and Sexuality,” in A Companion to American Women's History, second edition, eds. Nancy A. Hewitt and Anne M. Valk (Wiley Blackwell, 2020).

“Mill Mother ‘Just A’waiting for a Strike’: Ella May Wiggins” in North Carolina Women: Their Lives and Times, eds. Michele Gillespie and Sally McMillen (University of Georgia Press, 2015).

Articles in Peer-Reviewed Journals

“‘We Help Our Clients Get and Keep Basic Needs’: The Appalachian Research and Defense Fund and Legal Services in Eastern Kentucky,” The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, 121, no. 2 (Spring 2023): 141-179.

“Pointing a Way Forward,” Introduction for the the special issue, the “Women’s Issue,” Southern Cultures, 26, no. 3 Southern (fall 2020).

“Representing Working-Class Lives, Struggle, and Movements in Twenty-First Century Films,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 18, no. 1 (March 2021).

“Appalachian War on Poverty and the Working Class,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History. Oxford University Press. Article published June 2020.

“The Company Owns the Mine But They Don’t Own Us: Feminist Critiques of Capitalism in the Appalachian South,” Gender & History 28, no. 1 (April 2016). Recipient of the A. Elizabeth Taylor Prize for the best article in women’s history, from the Southern Association for Women Historians.

“Mountain Feminist: Helen Matthews Lewis, Appalachian Studies, and the Long Women’s Movement,” from an interview by Jessica Wilkerson, compiled and introduced by Jessica Wilkerson and David P. Cline, in Southern Cultures 17, no. 3 (fall 2011).

Selected Fellowships and Honors

  • Finalist, Dan Jenkins Medal for Excellence in Sportswriting, 2024

  • Outstanding Researcher Award, Eberly College of Arts & Sciences, WVU, 2023-2024

  • Named a Carnegie Fellow, 2021-2023

  • H.L. Mitchell Book Award, Southern Historical Association

  • Honorable Mention, Phillip Taft Prize in Labor and Working-Class History

  • College of Liberal Arts Mike L. Edwards New Scholar Award, University of Mississippi, 2020.

  • A. Elizabeth Taylor Prize for best article in southern women's history, Southern Association for Women Historians, 2017.

  • Visiting Scholar, American Academy of Arts & Sciences (One year research fellowship), 2016-2017. 

  • Lerner-Scott Prize for the best doctoral dissertation in women’s history, Organization of American Historians, 2015.

  • Herbert G. Gutman Prize for Outstanding Dissertation, Labor and Working-Class History Association, 2015.

  • American Fellowship, American Association of University Women, 2013-2014.

Teaching Experience

University of Tennessee

  • HIUS 382: Appalachian History (UG)

West Virginia University

  • History 261: Modern America (UG), for the Higher Ed Prison Initiative

  • History 459: New Deal to Great Society (UG/G)

  • History 445: History of American Women (UG/G)

  • History 763: Readings in United States History (G)

  • History 773: Readings in Appalachian Regional History (G)

University of Mississippi

  • History 336: Southern Women in History (UG)

  • History 332: The 20th Century South (UG)

  • History 399: U.S. Social Movements Since 1945 (UG)

  • Southern Studies 101/102: Introduction to Southern Studies (UG)

  • Southern Studies 402: Capstone Seminar for Majors (UG)

  • Southern Studies 560: Oral History and Southern Social Movements

  • Southern Studies 601: Introduction to Southern Studies (G)

  • History 613: Contemporary U.S. History (G)

  • History 641: Global Feminisms (G)