Bio
Michele Gillespie is Presidential Endowed Chair of Southern History. She teaches courses on the American South and U.S. history. She has published two books as well as a number of articles and book chapters, and co-edited a number of collections.
Background
Education
B.A. Rice University 1983 (History and English)
M.A., Ph.D. Princeton University 1990
Academic Appointments
Wake Forest University. Professor 1999 – Present
Agnes Scott College. 1990 – 1996
Administrative Appointments
Wake Forest University. Provost 2022 – Present
Wake Forest University. Dean of the College 2015 – 2022
Wake Forest University. Associate Provost for Academic Initiatives 2007 – 2010
- FYS Seminar Thomas Jefferson & His World
Explores Thomas Jefferson in all his complexity as political thinker, public figure, slaveholder and private man in the context of the Age of Revolution. - HST 110. The Atlantic World since 1500
Addresses the interactions of civilizations on four continents surrounding the Atlantic Ocean from 1500 to the present and the emergence of modern ideas about democracy, capitalism and freedom. - HST 337 Women and Gender in Early America
Examines the historical context in which ideas of femininity and masculinity were constructed and their political, economic and cultural significance across race, class and gender from 1600 to 1865. - HST 363 The History of the Slave South
Explores the origins of southern distinctiveness in the U.S., from the first interactions of Europeans, Native Americans and Africans through the Civil War and Emancipation. - HST 364 The Making of the Modern South
Examines the complicated history of this region and its relationship to the nation and world since 1865 through its multiple political, economic and cultural re-inventions. - HST 380: America at Work
Analyzes historical change in the U.S through the lenses of work and workers, owners and innovators, businesses and technologies, management and leadership since the colonial era - HST 390 Research Seminar
Recent themes have included “Popular Culture in the Making of America,” “Emancipation and Its Legacies,” and “Memory, Culture, and the Making of the South.” - HST 391 Honors Seminar.
Addresses various theories and philosophies of history and applies them in a collaborative research project.
- Katharine and R.J. Reynolds: Partners of Fortune and the Making of the New South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012). CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2013.
- Free Labor in an Unfree World: White Artisans in Slaveholding Georgia, 1789-1860 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000). Winner of the Malcolm and Muriel Bell Award, Most Distinguished Book in Georgia History, Georgia Historical Society, 2001. Paperback edition issued in 2003.
- North Carolina Women: Their Lives and Times, edited by Michele Gillespie and Sally McMillen, eds. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, vol. 1, 2014; vol. 2, 2015).
- Susanna Delfina, Michele Gillespie, and Louis Kyriakoudes, eds., Southern Society and Its Transformations, 1790-1860, Vol. 3 in New Directions in the History of Southern Economy and Society series (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2011).
- Susanna Delfino and Michele Gillespie, eds., Technology, Innovation & Southern Industrialization, Vol. 2 in New Directions in the History of Southern Economy and Society series (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008).
- Michele Gillespie and Robert Beachy, eds., Pious Pursuits: German Moravians in the Atlantic World, N.Y.: Berghahn Books, 2007.
- Michele Gillespie and Randal Hall, eds., Thomas Dixon and the Birth of Modern America, Louisiana State University Press, 2006. Paperback edition issued in 2009.
- Susanna Delfino and Michele Gillespie, eds., Global Perspectives on Industrial Transformation in the American South, Vol. 1 in New Directions in the History of Southern Economy and Society series, Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005.
- Susanna Delfino and Michele Gillespie, eds., Neither Lady Nor Slave: Working Women of the Old South, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.
- Michele Gillespie and Catherine Clinton, eds., Taking Off the White Gloves: Southern Women and Women’s History, Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1998.
- Catherine Clinton and Michele Gillespie, eds., The Devil’s Lane: Sex and Race in the Early South, NY: Oxford University Press, 1997.
- “Edith Vanderbilt and Katharine Smith Reynolds: The Public Lives of Progressive North Carolina’s Wealthiest Women” for inclusion in volume 1 of North Carolina Women: Their Lives and Times, edited by Michele Gillespie and Sally McMillen, eds. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2014.
- “Peddling the Lost Cause: a Southern White Woman at Work,” in Burton, et. al., eds. The Struggle for Equality: Essays in Honor of James McPherson, University Press of Virginia, 2011.
- “Selling the Lost Cause: Mary Gay and Her Books,” in Georgia Women in History, edited by Anne Chirhart and Betty Wood, vol. 1. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009.
- “To Harden a Lady’s Hand’: Gender Politics, Racial Realities, and Women Mill Workers in Antebellum Georgia,” in Delfino and Gillespie, eds., Neither Lady nor Slave: Working Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002). Reprinted in J. William Harris, The Old South: New Studies in Politics and Culture, 2nd ed. (N.Y.: Routledge, 2007).
- “The Politics of Race and Gender: Mary Musgrove and the Georgia Trustees,” in Clinton and Gillespie, eds., The Devil’s Lane: Sex and Race in the Early South (NY: Oxford University Press, 1997). Reprinted in Mary Beth Norton, Major Problems in American Women’s History, 3rd edition, 2003 and 4th edition, 2007 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin).
- Gillian Overing, Judith Irwin-Mulcahy, Michele Gillespie, Emily Wakild, and Ulrike Wiethaus, “To the Ice-House”– With Apologies to Virginia Woolf: Conversations on Place in the Humanities, Forum: University Postgraduate Journal of Culture and the Arts, Issue 10, Spring 2010, Space/s, University of Edinburgh, http://forum.llc.ed.ac.uk/current_issue/10/index.php#3
- “Building Networks of Knowledge: Henry Merrell and Textile Manufacturing in the Antebellum South,” in Susanna Delfino and Michele Gillespie, eds., Technology, Innovation & Southern Industrialization, Vol. 2 in New Directions in the History of Southern Economy and Society series (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008).
- “My Garden State: Memory, History and the Agrarian Ideal,” Southern Rural Sociology 22(1) (2007): 28-39.