Jessica Wilkerson
Associate Professor, Stuart and Joyce Robbins Distinguished Chair of History
Categorized As
“A focus on women in Appalachia — from those who led famous labor movements, to those who wrote iconic protest music, fought for access to the basic necessities of life, and stood on the frontlines of the climate crisis — underscores that the region has long been a site of struggle where women identified the sources of misery in their lives, imagined new possibilities, and struggled to remake their communities, and thus American society.”
Appalachia and the South; Women, Gender, and Sexuality; 20th Century America; Labor and the Working Class
Teaching Fields
- Appalachia and the South
- Women, Gender, and Sexuality
- 20th Century America
- Labor and the Working Class
Degrees
- Ph.D., University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, 2014
- M.A., Sarah Lawrence College, 2006
- B.A., Carson Newman College, 2003
Research Interests
Dr. Wilkerson’s research and teaching explores questions of political economy and social change in the twentieth-century South and Appalachia. She is currently interested in exploring—and countering—big narratives: that of Appalachia and how it intersects with ideas of race and gender; and the mainstream history of the modern American women’s movement.
Her first book, To Live Here, You Have to Fight: How Women Led Appalachian Movements for Social Justice (University of Illinois Press, 2019), traces the alliances forged and the grassroots movements led by working-class women in the Appalachian South in the 1960s and 1970s. The book received the H.L. Mitchell Award for distinguished book on the southern working class from the Southern Historical Association and Honorable Mention from the Philip Taft Prize in Labor and Working-Class History. The dissertation on which the book was based won the OAH Lerner-Scott Prize and the Labor and Working-Class History’s Herbert Gutman Prize.
Dr. Wilkerson is currently working on two book projects. They'll Never Keep Us Down: A Women's History of Appalachia, under contract with Simon & Schuster, will be the first narrative history of the Mountain South through the lives of women who lived and worked in the region from the late nineteenth century to the present. In her other project, In Sisterhood, In Struggle: Encountering Feminism in the American South (UNC Press), Dr. Wilkerson explores the understudied yet expansive forms of feminist activism throughout the South and Appalachia from the 1960s through the1990s. Along with scholarly projects, she has written regularly for popular media outlets including 100 Days in Appalachia, Boston Review, NPR, Rewire News, Washington Post, Oxford American, and Longreads.
Dr. Wilkerson has collaborated on or co-founded several oral history and public history projects, including the Long Women's Movement Project at the Southern Oral History Program, the Invisible Histories Project-Mississippi to document LGBTQ+ history in Mississippi, and the Black Families of Yalobusha County, MS Oral History Project at the University of Mississippi. At WVU, she is currently collaborating with women coal miners on an oral history project documenting their lives and work, and she is on the advisory board for the West Virginia Feminist Activist History Collection.
Dr. Wilkerson is also the senior associate editor of LABOR: Studies in Working Class History (Duke University Press).
Before arriving at WVU, she was on faculty at the University of Mississippi for six years and was a visiting scholar at the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. She was awarded the prestigious Carnegie Fellowship during 2021-2023.
Personal Website: https://jessicawilkerson.org/
Graduate Students
- Luke Masa
- Meghan Mayo
- Zachary Patrick
- Ben Susman
- Melissa Thompson
- Tristan Williams
- Steven Hammond
- David Solomon
- Matthew Powell
- Caitlyn Harless
- Jordan Bennett
- Christian Rowe
Courses Offered
- HIST 445: History of American Women
- HIST 459: U.S. History, New Deal to Great Society
- HIST 763: Readings in United States History, 1898 to the present
- HIST 773: Readings in Appalachian History
Publications
Grants and Awards
- Andrew Carnegie Fellows Program, 2021-2023
- College of Liberal Arts Mike L. Edwards New Scholar Award, University of Mississippi, 2020.
- Honorable Mention, Philip Taft Prize in Labor and Working-Class History, awarded by IRL, Cornell University, 2020.
- A. Elizabeth Taylor Prize for best article in southern women's history, Southern Association for Women Historians, 2017.
- Visiting Scholar, American Academy of Arts & Sciences, 2016-2017.
- Lerner-Scott Prize for the best doctoral dissertation in women’s history, Organization of American Historians, 2015.
- Herbert G. Gutman Prize for Outstanding Dissertation, Labor and Working-Class History Association, 2015.
- American Fellowship, American Association of University Women, 2013-2014.
- Moody Research Grant, Lyndon B. Johnson Library, 2013.
Return to Listing