|
Dr. Walker is an award-winning teacher and scholar. She is the first faculty member at Converse to hold the George Dean Johnson, Jr. chair in history. In recognition of her work at Converse, she received the O’Herron Award for Faculty Excellence in 2002 and the Kathryne Amelia Brown Award for outstanding teaching at Converse in 2001 as well as the Scholarly and Creative Achievement Award in 2007. She teaches a wide variety of courses in U.S History including The New South, The American Revolution in the Southern Backcountry, US Women’s History, African American history, and other. She regularly works with students on original research—sometimes an independent project pursued by a single student and sometimes on large projects involving an entire class. For example, in 2004, students in her African-American history course researched the history of a Spartanburg neighborhood that became part of a book published by the Hub City Writer’s Project in November 2005.
She also enjoys working with K-12 history teachers. In addition to teaching graduate courses for current and aspiring teachers, in 2004, she served as the Master Scholar for a Teaching American History grant sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education. In this capacity, she provided public school teachers with instruction in American history. In summer 2007, she led two one-week workshops for 100 teachers from across the country who came to Converse to study the American Revolution in the Southern Backcountry. This workshop was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities Landmarks in American History and Culture Workshop program. See the NEH Project website site for more information.
Dr. Walker is also an active scholar. In 2007, her book Southern Farmers and Their Stories was published by the University Press of Kentucky. The book was awarded a prestigious Outstanding Academic Title Award from Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries for its overall excellence in scholarship and its value to undergraduate students. Her first book, All We Knew Was to Farm: Rural Women in the Upcountry South, 1919-1941, was published by John Hopkins University Press in 2000. The Southern Association for Women Historians awarded the book the Willie Lee Rose Prize for the best book in Southern history authored by a woman. She is co-editor of Southern Women at the Millennium, an edited collection of essays drawn from a 2001 conference she helped organize at Converse. Her edited collection of oral histories, Country Women Cope with Hard Times, was published by University of South Carolina Press in 2004. She also co-edited a book called Work Family and Faith: Rural Southern Women in the Twentieth Century with Dr. Rebecca Sharpless of Texas Christian University. She just finished editing the agriculture volume of The New Encyclopedia for Southern Culture.
Dr. Walker has received numerous grants to fund her research, most recently a Franklin Research Grant from the American Philosophical Society. She is recipient of the John Trotwood and Mary Daniel Moore Memorial Award from the Tennessee Historical Association and the National Mortar Board Award for Excellence in Advising. She was Joseph J. Malone Faculty Fellow to Syria in 1998. She served as the Executive Secretary of the Southern Association for Women Historians for five years, and she currently first vice president of that organization. She also serves as president of the board of HubCulture, Inc., a Spartanburg arts arts organization.
In her spare time, Dr. Walker enjoys gardening, hiking and biking with her husband, and reading mystery novels.
|
Melissa Walker