Jacquelyn Dowd Hall

Jacquelyn Dowd Hall (born 1943) is an American historian and Julia Cherry Spruill Professor Emerita at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Jacquelyn Dowd Hall was born in Pauls Valley, Oklahoma, in 1943, the oldest of five children.

After graduating from high school as valedictorian, she attended Memphis Southwestern College (now Rhodes College), where she first became involved in the Civil rights movement when she joined student protests against segregation.

Her scholarship and teaching forwarded the emergence of U.S. women's history in the 1960s and 1970s, helped to inspire new research on Southern labor history and the long civil rights movement, and encouraged the use of oral history sources in historical research.

She is the author of Revolt Against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women’s Campaign Against Lynching; Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World (with James Leloudis, Robert R. Korstad, Mary Murphy, Lu Ann Jones, and Christopher R. Daly;) and Sisters and Rebels: The Struggle for the Soul of America.

In 1965, she graduated from Southwestern with high honors.

Hall worked as a flight attendant for Delta Air Lines in 1965 and 1966.

In 1967, she earned a Master of Arts from Columbia University.

In 1970, she moved from New York City to Atlanta, where she worked for the Southern Regional Council, helped to lead an oral history project at the Institute for Southern Studies, and was involved in the women's liberation movement.

From 1970 to 1982, she was married to Bob Hall, who went on to be an organizer, investigative reporter, and long-time head of the Institute for Southern Studies and executive director of Democracy NC.

In 1973, she became a tenure track instructor in the history department at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and founding director of UNC's Southern Oral History Program (SOHP).

Studying under Kenneth T. Jackson, she completed her Ph.D. at Columbia University, with distinction, in 1974.

Her dissertation, which became her first book, won the Bancroft Award for the best dissertation in American history, diplomacy, or international relations.

In 1989, Hall was named Julia Cherry Spruill Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

During her time at UNC, she served as advisor and mentor to many graduate students, a number of whom went on to distinguished scholarly careers and to leadership positions in oral history and public history endeavors.

She was elected to the Society of American Historians in 1990 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011.

She served as director of the Southern Oral History Program until 2011.

During her tenure, the SOHP collected over 5000 interviews on the history of the American South, covering topics such as industrialization, the long civil rights movement, women's history, and Southern politics.

In May 2013, Hall and her husband Robert Korstad, a professor of history and public policy at Duke University, whom she married in 1995, were among the second group of protestors to be arrested in North Carolina's Moral Monday protests against measures taken by then-Governor Pat McCrory and the Republican-controlled North Carolina General Assembly.

They were also among the founders of Scholars for North Carolina's Future.

Hall has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Radcliffe Center for Advanced Study, the Wilson Center, and the National Humanities Center.

Books:

Collaborative Books:

Edited Works:

Selected Articles in Scholarly Journals:

Book Chapters:

She retired in 2014 and resides in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

She also served as Mark W. Clark Distinguished Visiting Professor of History at the Citadel (2015), Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the California Institute of Technology (1995), director of the Duke University–University of North Carolina Center for Research on Women (1991–1994), and Ford Foundation Professor at the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi (1987).

Over the course of her career, Hall has been elected president of the Organization of American Historians and the Southern Historical Association and founding president of the Labor and Working Class History Association.