PRESIDENT
Dr. Jack Temple Kirby
Miami University
(904) 471-2564

Dr. Kirby spent his entire career at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio where he was the W.E. Smith Professor of American History when he retired in 2002. He earned his PhD at the University of Virginia in 1965. Among his eight books are Darkness at the Dawning: Race and Reform in the Progressive South (1972); Media-Made Dixie: The South in the American Imagination (1977); Rural Worlds Lost: The American South, 1920-1960 (1987); The Countercultural South (1995); and most recently, Mockingbird Song: Ecological Landscapes of the South (2006), which won a Bancroft Prize in 2007. He is currently living in St. Augustine, Florida.

VICE PRESIDENT
Dr. William J. Cooper, Jr.
Louisiana State University
(225) 578-4495

Dr. Cooper has taught at Louisiana State University since 1968, and has held the Boyd Professorship in History since 1989. He served as dean of the Graduate School for most of the 1980s. His books include The Conservative Regime: South Carolina, 1877-1890 (1968); The South and the Politics of Slavery, 1858-1856 (1978); Liberty and Slavery: Southern Politics to 1860 (1983); and the textbook, The American South: A History (multiple editions since 1990), co-authored with Thomas E. Terrill. His more recent work has focused on the president of the Confederacy, and includes a full biography, Jefferson Davis, American (2001), the Modern Library’s Jefferson Davis: The Essential Writings (2003) and Jefferson Davis and the Civil War Era (2008).

EDITOR
Dr. John B. Boles
Rice University
(713) 348-6039

Dr. Boles is the William Pettus Hobby Professor of History at Rice University. In 2008, he celebrated his 25th year as Editor of the Journal of Southern History. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia in 1969. His books include The Great Revival, 1787-1805: The Origins of the Southern Evangelical Mind (1972), Black Southerners, 1619-1869 (1983), The South Through Time: A History of an American Region (1999), and University Builder: Edgar Odell Lovett and the Founding of the Rice Institute (2007). Among his many edited works are Masters and Slaves in the House of the Lord: Race and Religion in the American South, 1740-1870 (1988), Interpreting Southern History: Historiographical Essays in Honor of Sanford W. Higginbotham (1987), coedited with Evelyn T. Nolen, and the Blackwell Companion to the American South.

Dr. Inscoe is University Professor at the University of Georgia. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1985. He is the author of Mountain Masters: Slavery and the Sectional Crisis in Western North Carolina (1989), Race, War, and Remembrance in the Appalachian South (2008), and co-author of The Heart of Confederate Appalachia: The Civil War in Western North Carolina (2000). He has edited or co-edited eassy collections on Georgia race relations, James Oglethorpe, Appalachians and race in the 19th century, southern Unionists during the Civil War, and a festschrift in honor of Emory Thomas. He is also the editor of the on-line New Georgia Encyclopedia.

PAST PRESIDENT
Dr. Leon F. Litwack
University of California at Berkeley
(510) 642-2272

Until his retirement in May 2007, Dr. Litwack was the Alexander F. and May T. Morrison Professor of American History at the University of California at Berkeley, where he has taught since 1964. He is the author and editor of several books, including North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860 (1965); Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (1979), which won both the Pulitzer Prize in history and the National Book Award; and Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (1998). He served as president of the Organization of American Historians in 1986-1987.

AWARD COMMITTEES