Faculty

Dennis C. Dickerson
James M. Lawson, Jr. Professor of History

PhD, Washington University, 1978

19th & 20th Century American History and African American History labor, religion, and the U. S. civil rights movement
           
Telephone: 615-343-4329
Email: dennis.c.dickerson@vanderbilt.edu
Office Hours: On leave 2008-2009
Office: Benson 209

Dennis C. Dickerson specializes in American Labor History, the History of the
U. S. civil rights movement, and African American religious history. He also is interested in the social history of American medicine and Wesleyan Studies. He has written Out of the Crucible: Black Steel Workers in Western Pennsylvania, 1875-1980 (Albany, State University of New York Press, 1986) which chronicles the failed century long struggle of black steel laborers to attain occupational parity with their Caucasian counterparts. He also wrote Militant Mediator: Whitney M. Young, Jr. (Lexington, University Press of Kentucky, 1998) which analyzes the leadership of a major leader in the U. S. civil rights movement in the 1960s. This book was awarded the 1999 Distinguished Book from the National Conference of Black Political Scientists. Presently, he has completed Protestant Preachers in the Public Square: The Careys of Chicago which examines the intersection between religion and politics in the careers of two clergy/politicians during most of the 20th century. The book is under contract to the University Press of Mississippi. He has received grants and fellowships to support his research and writing from the American Philosophical Society, the National Endowment of the Humanities, the Rockefeller Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Louisville Institute.
   

Dickerson has served since 1988 as Historiographer of the African Methodist Episcopal Church and in this capacity has written Religion, Race, and Region: Research Notes on A.M.E. Church History (Nashville, A.M.E. Sunday School Union, 1995) and A Liberated Past: Explorations in A.M.E. Church History (Nashville, A.M.E. Sunday School Union, 2003), and has been Editor of the A.M.E. Church Review since 2000.

He has been a member and presenter at the 11th Oxford Institute on Methodist Theological Studies in 2002 and at the 12th Oxford Institute on Methodist Theological Studies in 2007 at Christ Church College, Oxford University, Oxford, England. In 2006 he was a scholar-in-residence at the Methodist University of Sao Paulo/Faculty of Theology (Universidade Metodista de Sao Paulo Faculdade de Teologia in Sao Paulo, Brazil). He served as President of the American Society of Church History in 2004. Dickerson received his Master of Divinity degree from Vanderbilt University Divinity School in December 2007. In January 2008 he joins the Editorial Board of Religion and American Culture: A journal of Interpretation.
     
Before coming to Vanderbilt Dickerson taught at Williams College from 1976 to 1999 and was Stanfield Professor History, Chairman of the Department of History, and Chairman of the Afro-American Studies Program. He has also taught at Rhodes College, Yale Divinity School, and Payne Theological Seminary.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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