Virginia Humanities

The Riverkeepers

The Cherokees, Their Neighbors, and the Rivers that Made America

Join Virginia Humanities Research Fellow Greg Smithers, a professor of history at Virginia Commonwealth University, for a talk on his research for a project entitled “The Riverkeepers: The Cherokees, Their Neighbors, and the Rivers that Made America.” The book is a biography of aquatic places that Cherokee people and their indigenous neighbors believed were filled […]

Fellows Talk: A People Between

Servitude and the Law in 18th-Century Virginia - Feb. 19, Charlottesville

Join Virginia Humanities Fellow and University of Oregon history professor Allison Madar for a discussion of her research on the history of early America and the early modern Atlantic world with a focus on unfreedom and the law. Her book-in-progress examines the legal and social dynamics of servitude and the ways in which masters used […]

The Greensboro Massacre: Ambush or Shootout?

Competing narratives of what happened on Nov. 3, 1979

On the morning of November 3, 1979, communist labor and anti-racist activists were preparing for a city-sanctioned, noontime rally in Greensboro, NC. The subject of their march was Ku Klux Klan interference with multi-racial union building efforts in the powerful, local textile mills.  As four news crews rolled their cameras, Klansmen (and women) and American […]

Stories of the Peaks

Interview with Susan Bratton

Susan Bratton is Professor of Environmental Studies and a Fellow of the Institute for Studies of Religion at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. This fall, Bratton is a Virginia Humanities Resident Fellow studying Native and early colonial religious beliefs about the Appalachian Trail and the surrounding landscape. On November 6, at the beginning of National […]

Archives, Poetry, & Perspectives on American History

Interview with Brenda Marie Osbey

Brenda Marie Osbey is an author of poetry and prose nonfiction in English and French. This fall, she is the Emilia Galli Struppa Fellow at Virginia Humanities and a visiting professor at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia (UVA). Her poems consider the experiences of American […]

Michelle Obama’s Impact on African American Women & Girls

Two-time Virginia Humanities residential Fellow and associate professor of Africana studies at Virginia Tech, Paula Marie Seniors was an editor of the recently published collection of essays, poetry, and art, Michelle Obama’s Impact on African American Women and Girls. The collection explores how First Lady Michelle Obama gradually expanded and broadened her role by engaging in social, […]

Thoughts on Poe

Tue. Nov. 27 - Richmond, Tue. Dec. 4 - Charlottesville

Join Virginia Humanities Fellow Dr. Richard Kopley, a Distinguished Professor of English, Emeritus, from Penn State DuBois, for a talk on his research for a critical biography of Edgar Allan Poe. A former president of the Poe Studies Association and a recent recipient of the group’s Lifetime Achievement and Service Award, Dr. Kopley has published […]

Foundations of the Appalachian Trail as Sacred Landscape

Colonial Demons and Holy Mountains

During the 1960s, academic critique of Christianity presented the Puritans and other American colonists as antagonistic to wilderness. Recent scholarship has, in contrast, described the Appalachian Trail corridor as a pilgrimage route. Virginia Humanities Fellow Susan Bratton, a religious and environmental studies professor at Baylor University, argues that multiple religions have portrayed the Appalachian peaks […]

Front Porches of the Dead

VFH Residential Fellow Alison Bell teaches anthropology at Washington & Lee University in Lexington, Virginia. Bell has been studying cemeteries in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley and says that in the 1980s a shift started happening in these spaces where the living and the dead come together.

Bell recently sat down with Trey Mitchell, director of web communications at VFH, to discuss her work.