You are invited to a presentation by Dwana Waugh, a Wilson Library Visiting Summer Research Fellow, in the Wilson Library Special Collections Learning Center.

Dwana Waugh, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of history at Sweet Briar College. She received her B.A. in history and education at Randolph-Macon Woman's College and earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in American history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research specializes in African American educational history, with a focus on public and oral histories. She examines the connections between race, politics, and historical memory in southern education. As a former public high school teacher, she is committed to exploring these connections between the contemporary past with recent educational policies. Waugh teaches courses in U.S. history, African American history, historical memory, and educational methodology.

Waugh's current project, "Schoolhouses Rocked: The Lessons of Race, Politics and Memory in the Post-Civil Rights South," engages in a study of how southern communities collectively remember school desegregation-era policies and uncovers the fraught struggles over the meaning of school desegregation in the post-civil rights era South. She argues that understanding the process of desegregation reveals an important moment in the post-civil rights South. As a groundswell of demands for black power emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s, so too did calls for a resurgence of conservatism. The tension between these two movements laid the foundation for the development of school desegregation policies. The result produced a complex set of relationships between federal, state, and local policymakers and the students, parents, teachers, and school administrators who experienced school desegregation first-hand. Using oral histories and archival sources, Waugh examines the multifaceted memories of school desegregation. In the process, she uncovers the often uneasy and constant negotiations between educational policies and their social and academic effects.

Support for Waugh's fellowship is generously provided by the Documenting Social Change Library Fund, which supports the study of American culture, politics, and social changes from 1960 to 1975.​

Questions? Contact Matt Turi, turi@email.unc.edu, or (919) 843-9620.