Faculty
“One of the things that comedy does is it helps us play – helps us use our imagination. And that’s something that people can really enjoy right now. It also brings us to moments of social critique and helps us see the world with new eyes.”
– Michelle Robinson
“The death penalty operates in constant opposition to itself, grinding out its lethal outcomes even as it fails to accomplish any of its intended purposes beyond exacting vengeance. It fails quietly when it provides the families of victims no closure or satisfaction after a horrific tragedy and the long years of suffering they experience in its wake. It fails spectacularly when innocent people are executed. This failure is not unusual. Many institutions fail, and many American institutions—even government—exist in a state of near constant failure.”
– Seth Kotch
“I come from a Southern-Jewish family in which food is the primary means of communication –cooking it, eating it, arguing about whether the matzoh ball soup has enough salt in it. Is any subject more interesting, more wrapped up in the essence of human life and connection, than food? My work is devoted to understanding and interpreting food as a cultural, political, and ethical system at work in the world.”
– Kelly Alexander
“As we approach the century mark for audio recording projects that began documenting traditional music forms in the Southern U.S. (and elsewhere), it is worth examining and interrogating the profound ways that old commercial and field recordings shape contemporary performance practices and understandings of these genres, especially as copies of older commercial and field recordings circulate widely and unexpectedly, accumulating new meanings and inspiring new interpretations.”
– Joseph Decosimo
“As a scholar and teacher of Asian American studies, I study the ways that diasporic experience shapes Asian American creative cultures and how they are, and are not, documented. I work broadly at the intersections of visual, literary, and material culture. I question how issues of archival retrieval and absence shape Asian American cultural productions in diasporic and interracial movements in North America. In addition to Asian American studies, my teaching and research areas include critical ethnic studies, gender and sexuality studies, and activist and institutional histories.”
– Kita Douglas
“Melville’s true patriots included a ragged bunch of survivors and hapless rebels who testified to the dignity of human experience despite the struggles that the species was destined to suffer. Melville celebrated a hybrid society that welcomed the world as its paternity and matrix and did not rope itself off in incestuous conventions from the fertile contamination of diversity… Melville thus helped to inaugurate the process of authoring the declaration of interdependence.”
– Tim Marr
“No ID coaxed Jay-Z into making the song that he was putting off, one that addressed the rumors of his infidelity to Beyoncé in the wake of her album Lemonade. He capitalized on the trust that he built to nudge Jay-Z to write about his relationship with Beyoncé. Like a midwife, he recognized that the song was ready to be born and helped Jay-Z push it out.”
– Antonia Randolph
“Performance theory encourages attention to storytelling as communication; to the teller’s creative process, rhetorical goals, and means for achieving them; to the social and cultural context in which the story is told; to the effects of the story on the audience; to the audience’s manifest and internal responses; and to the reciprocal efforts of the teller to anticipate, satisfy, and possibly transform the audience’s expectations. A performance approach emphasizes that a story is more than words or text.”
– Patricia Sawin
| Name | Title | Research Interests | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
 | Alexander, Kelly | Instructor | • food studies • ethnographic methods • documentary studies • feminisms | kelly.alexander@unc.edu |
 | Allen, Robert | Distinguished Professor | • digital humanities • American cultural history • family history | rallen@email.unc.edu |
 | Berlinger, Gabrielle | Assistant Professor | • material culture • ritual • Jewish folklore and ethnology • ethnography • public folklore • museum anthropology | gberling@unc.edu |
 | Cobb, Daniel | Professor | • American Indian and Indigenous Studies • American Indian history • politics and activism • ethnohistorical methods • biography and memory • global indigenous rights | dcobb@unc.edu |
 | Diaz, Von | Professor of Practice | • Puerto Rico • The Caribbean • Food • Oral History • Journalism • Gender • Race • Immigration • The American South | vondiaz@email.unc.edu |
 | Douglas, Kita | Teaching Assistant Professor | • Asian American literature • Asian American visual culture • gender & sexuality studies • archives and material culture | kitakd@email.unc.edu |
 | Engelhardt, Elizabeth | Distinguished Professor | • Southern cultures • food • Appalachia • feminism • literature • region and place | e.engelhardt@unc.edu |
 | Frey, Benjamin E. | Assistant Professor | • sociolinguistics • language shift • Cherokee language | benfrey@live.unc.edu |
 | Herman, Bernard | Distinguished Professor | • material and visual culture • folklore and folk life • cultures of the American South • vernacular art | blherman@email.unc.edu |
 | Hinson, Glenn | Associate Professor | • public folklore • ethnography • African American expressive culture • American South | ghinson@unc.edu |
 | Holland, Sharon | Distinguished Professor | • critical race theory • feminist theory • queer theory • sexuality studies • animal studies | pasharon@email.unc.edu |
 | Kotch, Seth | Associate Professor and Director, Southern Oral History Program | • modern south • oral history • criminal and social justice | sethkotch@unc.edu |
 | Marr, Timothy | Associate Professor | • Nineteenth-Century American literary and cultural history • Transnational American Studies • religion in American culture • Islam in/and America • Herman Melville | marr@unc.edu |
 | Randolph, Antonia | Assistant Professor | • Black Masculinity • Popular Culture (Hip-Hop) •Music • Race Theory • Education • Sexuality | antonia.randolph@unc.edu |
 | Richotte, Jr., Keith | Associate Professor | • American Indian law and policy • legal history • constitutionalism | richotte@email.unc.edu |
 | Robinson, Michelle | Associate Professor | • 19th and 20th century U.S. religious history • 19th and 20th century American literature • U.S. cinema | mmrobins@unc.edu |
 | Sawin, Patricia | Associate Professor | • narrative • discourse • festival • culture of adoption | sawin@unc.edu |
 | Willis, Rachel | Professor | • global American Studies • transportation planning • labor economics • service-learning, experiential and higher education | Rachel.Willis@unc.edu |
Adjunct/Affiliated:
Daniel Anderson, English & Comparative Literature
William L. Andrews, English & Comparative Literature
Sarah Boyd, English & Comparative Literature
Fitzhugh Brundage, History
Maggie Cao, Art & Art History
Claude Clegg, African American & Diaspora Studies, and History
Tyree Daye, English & Comparative Literature
María DeGuzmán, English & Comparative Literature
Kathleen DuVal, History
Lawrence Grossberg, Communication Studies
Philip F. Gura, English & Comparative Literature
Amy Hertel, American Indian Center
Wes Hogan, Center for Documentary Studies-Duke
Heidi Kim, English & Comparative Literature
Malinda Maynor Lowery, History
Jocelyn Neal, Music and Folklore
Michael Palm, Communication Studies
Della Pollock, Communication Studies
Eliza Richards, English & Comparative Literature
Katherine Roberts, Center for the Study of the American South
William Sturkey, History
Jane Thrailkill, English & Comparative Literature
Tim Tyson, Center for Documentary Studies-Duke
Harry Watson, History
Anne Whisnant, History
Emeritus Professors
Marcie Ferris
William R. Ferris
Peter Filene
Jacquelyn Hall
John Kasson
Joy Kasson
Townsend Ludington
Daniel Patterson
Theda Perdue
Charles Zug