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: TBA in August
Office: 209 Benson

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. Dickerson's new book, African American Preachers and Politics: The Careys of Chicago (Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 2010) examines the intersection between religion and politics in the careers of two clergy/politicians during most of the 20th century. 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), African Methodism and its Wesleyan Heritage: Reflections on AME Church History (Nashville, A.M.E. Sunday School Union, 2009), 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. He belongs to the Editorial Board for the forthcoming three volumes of The Cambridge History of Religions in America. He contributed "The African American Wing of the Wesleyan Tradition," in Randy L. Maddox and Jason E. Vickers, Editors, The Cambridge Companion to John Wesley, New York, Cambridge University Press, 2010. Also, he contributed three essays to Henry H. Knight, III, editor, From Aldersgate to Azusa Street: Wesleyan, Holiness, and Pentecostal Visions of the New Creation (Eugene, Oregon, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2010) and five entries to Daniel Patte, editor, The Cambridge Dictionary of Christianity (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2010). Most recently, he wrote “Liberation, Wesleyan Theology, and Early African Methodism, 1760-1840,” Wesley and Methodist Studies, Volume 3, (Manchester, UK, Didsbury Press, 2011) pp. 109-120.

His current book projects include "'Brother in the Spirit of Gandhi:' William Stuart Nelson and the Religious Origins of the Civil Rights Movement," and "A Short History of the African Methodist Episcopal Church" which is under contract to Cambridge University Press.
     
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.