Professor Jeff Norrell Retires
Professor Jeff Norrell retired in January 2024 after holding the Bernadotte Schmitt Chair of Excellence since joining the department in 1998. He is the author of more than a dozen books, primarily on American race relations and Southern history.
These include Alex Haley and the Books that Changed a Nation (2015), which covers Haley’s rise to national celebrity and great literary influence in the mid-20th century. In 2009, the Washington Post called his revisionist biography, Up from History: the Life of Booker T. Washington, one of the best books published that year, “in all respects an exemplary book, scrupulously fair to its subject and thus to the reader as well.”
His 1985 book, Reaping the Whirlwind: The Civil Rights Movement in Tuskegee, won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award for outstanding work on human rights and social justice. In addition to his many works of history, he published Eden Rise (2012), a novel about the civil rights movement.
In addition to courses on Southern history, Norrell taught undergraduate and graduate classes on environmental history, the history of the American West, and American foreign policy. He recently published How History Was Used in the Wars of the Twentieth Century: Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace (Lexington, 2023).
In 2010 he was Fulbright Distinguished Chair in American Studies in Germany, and in 2015 the College of Arts and Sciences presented him with a Senior Research Award.