Sonya Ramsey

BIOGRAPHY

Sonya Ramsey grew up in Nashville, Tennessee, and attended Howard University, where she received a B.A. in Journalism and received her Master’s and Ph.D. in United States History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A Professor of History and Women’s and Gender Studies, Dr. Ramsey is the Director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Dr. Ramsey is the author of Bertha Maxwell-Roddey, a Modern-Day Race Woman and the Power of Black Leadership, (University Press of Florida, 2022) and several historical works, including Reading, Writing, and Segregation: a Century of Black Women Teachers in Nashville, published by the University of Illinois Press (2008). 

 EDUCATION

Ph.D. United States History – University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2000.

ACADEMIC, ADMINISTRATIVE, AND PROFESSIONAL POSITIONS

• Professor of History and Women’s and Gender Studies, UNC Charlotte, 2022
• Associate Professor of History and Women’s and Gender Studies (with tenure), UNC Charlotte, 2010 – 2022         
• Director, Women and Gender Studies Program, UNC Charlotte, July 2021                                                                           
• Co-Editor, Book Reviews Section, History of Education Quarterly, 2019-2023                                                                       
• Editorial Board Member, North Carolina Historical Review,  North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, 2021-26                               
• Editorial Board Member,  The American Historian, Organization of American Historians, 2019-22                                 
• Hooks Academic Research Fellow, Benjamin L. Hooks Institute for Social Change, University of Memphis, 2021-23

PUBLICATIONS

BOOKS                                                                                                                                                              Bertha Maxwell-Roddey, a Modern-Day Race Woman Bertha Maxwell-Roddey, a Modern-Day Race Woman and the Power of Black Leadership, (University Press of Florida, 2022).                   

Reading, Writing, and Segregation: A Century of Black Women Teachers in Nashville, Tennessee, (Champaign-Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2008).

ARTICLES
 “Caring is Activism: Black Southern Womanist Teachers Theorizing and the Careers of Kathleen Crosby and Bertha Maxwell Roddey, 1946–1986,” Educational Studies: A Journal of the American Educational Studies Association 48, no. 3 (May 2012): 244-265.

 “We Are Ready [to Desegregate] Whenever They Are: African American Teachers and the Desegregation of the Public Schools in Nashville, Tennessee, 1954-1966,” Journal of African American History 90, nos. 1-2 (Winter 2005): 29-51.

NON-REFEREED ARTICLES
“The Troubled History of African American Education After the Brown Decision,” The American Historian published by the Organization of American Historians, Feb. 2017.

BOOK CHAPTERS
“The Destiny of Our Race Lies Largely in Their Hands:’ African American Women Teachers’ Efforts during the Progressive Era in Memphis and Nashville,” in Tennessee Women in the Progressive Era: Toward the Public Sphere in the New South, Mary A. Evins, ed. (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee, 2013).

“Of Culture and Conviction: African American Women Non-Fiction Writers and the Gendered Definition of Class,” The Southern Middle Class in the Long Nineteenth Century, Jennifer Green and Jonathan Daniel Wells, eds. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011).

RESEARCH INTERESTS

African American Gender History, History of Education, Oral History, Women’s and Gender Studies, Southern History, History of The United States Since 1865

COURSES TAUGHT

• HIST 3000 A02, The African American Entrepreneurial Spirit
• HIST 2162 African American Women’s History to 1865
• HIST 2163 African American Women’s History Since 1865
• HIST 3000 A01, History of Education in the US
• HIST 4600 History of  US Social Movements
• HIST 6000 US History Graduate Colloquium Since 1865
• HIST 1161 US History Since 1877
• LBST 2101 Western History and Culture
• WGST 4160/5160 Race, Sexuality, and the Body

SELECTED CURRENT PROJECTS AND WORKS IN PROGRESS

ARTICLE IN PROGRESS                                                                                                                                     “I Would Never Quit:” the Gendered Experiences of African American Women Non-Union Factory Workers in the Carolinas, 1960s-2000s,” uses oral history to describe the historical experiences of African American and white women who worked in manufacturing in the Piedmont region of the Carolinas from the beginning of the 1960s desegregation-era  to the influx of business globalization in the 2000s. These women workers waged individual and collective battles against racism and/or sexism, often without union protection, while simultaneously adapting to influential technological, social, and economic changes, such as automation, immigration, and globalization.

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