Curriculum Vitae
Bruce E. Baker
School of History, Classics and Archaeology
Armstrong Building
Newcastle University
Newcastle upon Tyne
NE1 7RU
UNITED KINGDOM
+44 (0)191 222 3636
bruce.baker@newcastle.ac.uk
Modern U.S. (since 1865)
Modern U.S. South (since 1865)
African American History & Culture
Labor History
Business History
Ph.D. December 2003, History, University of North Carolina
- dissertation: "Devastated by Passion and Belief: Remembering Reconstruction in the Twentieth-Century South" (directed by Jacquelyn Dowd Hall)
M.A. August 1995, Folklore, University of North Carolina
- thesis: "Lynching Ballads in North Carolina" (directed by Daniel W. Patterson)
B.A. December 1992, English, Clemson University
B.A. December 1992, Philosophy, Clemson University
2022 March - present, Professor of American History and African American Studies, Newcastle University
2019 Autumn - March 2022, Reader in American History, Newcastle University
2013 Autumn - 2019 Autumn, Lecturer in American History, Newcastle University
2008 Spring - 2013 Autumn, Senior Lecturer in United States History, Royal Holloway, University of London
2004 Autumn - 2008 Spring, Lecturer in United States History, Royal Holloway, University of London
2004 Spring, Instructor, Department of History, University of Wisconsin-Superior
2003 Autumn, Teaching Fellow, Department of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
1996-1999, adjunct instructor of English, Trident Technical College, Charleston, S.C.
1996 Spring, adjunct instructor, Department of English, University of North Carolina-Charlotte
1995-1998, freelance folklorist working in Kentucky, North Carolina, and South Carolina
1995-1996, adjunct instructor, Department of English, York County Technical College, Rock Hill, S.C.
2011-2012 Royal Holloway College Teaching Prize
2006-2007 Royal Holloway College Teaching Prize
2000-2003 Dolores Zohrab Liebmann Fellow
1999-2000 Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in Humanistic Studies
1993-1994 Merit Assistantship, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
1993 Winner of Roger Rollin Undergraduate Essay Contest, Clemson University
1991-1992 Outstanding Student in Philosophy, Clemson University
1988-1992 R. F. Poole Scholar, Clemson University
September 2021, Northern Bridge AHRC Doctoral Training Programme Collaborative Doctoral Award, "Native Ground. Moses Roper, Fugitive abolitionist; emancipatory activism, anti-slavery radicalism and and Print Culture in Wales"
September 2018, Northern Bridge AHRC Doctoral Training Programme Studentship, Iain Flood, "Violence and Victimhood: The Effects of Irregular Violence in Civil War Era Missouri"
September 2017, Northern Bridge AHRC Doctoral Training Programme Studentship, Joe Ross, "The American Civil War in the Age of the Taiping Rebellion"
April 2015, "Rat-Proofing the Gulf South: Bubonic Plague and Public Health, 1912-1920," New Orleans Center for the Gulf South, Tulane University, $2000 (declined)
January 2013, "Rat Proofing the Gulf Coast: Bubonic Plague, Public Health, and Urban Life in New Orleans, 1914-1915," RHUL Research Strategy Fund,
£2200
June 2006, "After Slavery: Race, Labour and Politics in the Post-Emancipation Carolinas," Arts and Humanities Research Council Research Grant, £209,439
(in collaboration with Brian Kelly, Queen's University Belfast, and Susan E. O'Donovan, University of Memphis)
June 2006, "This Mob Will Surely Take My Life: Lynchings in the Carolinas, 1871-1947," British Academy Small Research Grant, £4075
October 2005, ""From New York to the New South: Hiram F. Hover's Analysis of Race and Class, 1885-1889," British Academy Overseas Conference
Grant, Southern Historical Association Annual Meeting, Atlanta, Georgia, £400
February 2019, “Dirty Cotton: How Corruption and Crime Can Help Us Rethink the History of Capitalism,” Charles L. Wood Agricultural History Lecture, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas, USA.
March 2018, “Who Is Reconstruction For?”, keynote lecturer for Freedoms Gained and Lost: Reinterpreting Reconstruction in the Atlantic World conference, Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World Program, College of Charleston, Charleston, South Carolina, USA.
April 2017, "Where Is the Business History of Cotton?", invited lecture, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA.
April 2016, keynote lecturer for Cotton and Rural History Conference, Collin College, Greenville, Texas, USA
Books, Author
Essential Skills for Historians: A Practical Guide to Researching the Past, co-authored with Laurence Hare and Jack Wells (London: Bloomsbury,
2019).
The Cotton Kings: Capitalism and Corruption in Turn-Of-The-Century New York and New Orleans, co-authored with Barbara Hahn (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2015)
This Mob Will Surely Take My Life: Lynching in the Carolinas, 1871-1947 (New York and London: Continuum, 2008).
What Reconstruction Meant: Historical Memory in the American South (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007; paperback 2010).
Books, Edited
Southern Scoundrels: Grifters and Graft in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Bruce E. Baker and Jeff Forret (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2021).
Eli Hill: A Novel of Reconstruction by Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin, edited and with an introduction by Bruce E. Baker and Jacquelyn Dowd Hall (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2020).
Remembering Reconstruction: Struggles Over the Meaning of America's Most Tumultuous Era, edited by Bruce E. Baker and Carole Emberton
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017)
The South at Work: Observations from 1904, by William Garrott Brown, edited with an introduction by Bruce E. Baker,
Southern Classics Series (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2014)
After Slavery: Race, Labor, and Citizenship in the Reconstruction South, edited by Bruce E. Baker and
Brian Kelly (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2013).
Books, Contributor
“Whom Was Reconstruction For?” in Freedoms Gained and Lost: Reconstruction and Its Meaning 150 Years Later, edited by Adam Domby and Simon Lewis (New York: Fordham University Press, 2021).
“Das Kapital on Tchoupitoulas Street: The Marketing of Stolen Goods and the Reserve Army of Labor in Reconstruction-Era New Orleans,” in Southern Scoundrels: Grifters and Graft in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Bruce E. Baker and Jeff Forret (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2021).
"The Memory of Reconstruction," in Oxford Reconstruction History Handbook, edited by Andrew L. Slap (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
"Against Synthesis: Diverse Approaches to the History of Reconstruction," (co-authored with Elaine Frantz Parsons) in Rewriting Southern History: Historiographical Essays, edited by Craig Thompson Friend and Lorri Glover (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2019).
"The Loose Cotton Economy of the New Orleans Waterfront in the Late Nineteenth Century," in Capitalism's Hidden Worlds, edited by Kenneth Lipartito and Lisa Jacobson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).
"Wade Hampton's Last Parade: Memory of Reconstruction in the 1970 South Carolina Tricentennial," in Remembering Reconstruction: Struggles Over the Meaning of America's Most Tumultuous Era, edited by Carole Emberton and Bruce E. Baker (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2017).
"Drovers, Distillers, and Democrats: Economic and Political Change in Northern Greenville County, 1865 -1878," in Bruce E. Baker and Brian Kelly,
eds., After Slavery: Race, Labor, and Citizenship in the Reconstruction South (Gainesville: University Press of Florida,
2013), 159-175.
"'The First Anarchist That Ever Came To Atlanta': Hiram F. Hover from New York to the New South" in Chris Green, Rachel Rubin, and James Smethurst, eds.,
Radicalism in the South Since Reconstruction (New York: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2006), 39-56.
"Under the Rope: Lynching and Memory in Laurens County, South Carolina," in W. Fitzhugh Brundage, ed., Where These Memories Grow: History, Memory,
and Southern Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 319-346.
"North Carolina Lynching Ballads," in W. Fitzhugh Brundage, ed., Under Sentence of Death: Lynching in the South (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1997), 219-246.
Refereed Publications
"'I am not a beggar': Moses Roper, Black Witness and the Lost Opportunity of British Abolitionism," Slavery and Abolition (Feb. 2022).
"Trading Spaces: Bodies, Space, and Information in the History of Open Outcry Trading," Enterprise and Society (under review), co-authored with Barbara Hahn
"Moses Roper, the First Fugitive Slave Lecturer in Ireland, 1838," Irish Journal of American Studies (August 2020), co-authored with Fionnghuala Sweeney. (http://ijas.iaas.ie/issue-9-sweeney-baker/).
"Fires On Shipboard: Sandbars, Salvage Fraud, and the Cotton Trade in New Orleans in the 1870s," Journal of Southern History 86:3 (August 2020): 601-624.
"Why North Carolinians are Tar Heels: A New Explanation," Southern Cultures 21:4 (Winter 2015): 81-94.
"The Growth of Towns after the Civil War and the Casualization of Black Labor, 1865-1880," Tennessee Historical Quarterly 72:4 (Winter 2013):
289-300.
"Picking Blackberries and Getting By after the Civil War," Southern Cultures 16:4 (Winter 2010): 21-40.
"How W. E. B. Du Bois Won the United Daughters of the Confederacy Essay Contest," Southern Cultures (Spring 2009): 69-81.
"Lynch Law Reversed: The Rape of Lula Sherman, the Lynching of Manse Waldrop, and the Debate Over Lynching in the 1880s," American Nineteenth Century
History 6:3 (September 2005): 273-293. Reprinted in William D. Carrigan, ed., Lynching Reconsidered: New Perspectives in the Study of Mob Violence
(New York: Routledge, 2007).
"The Death of Emma Hartsell," Southern Cultures (Spring 2003): 82-91.
"The 'Hoover Scare' in South Carolina, 1887: An Attempt to Organize Black Farm Labor" Labor History 40:3 (August 1999): 261-282.
Non-Refereed Publications
"Butler the Beast", We're History, 16 May 2016
"This Historian Has Some Advice for Bernie", on History News Network, 29 November 2015
"How the Federal Government Saved New Orleans from Disaster a Century Ago" on We're History, 2 April 2015
"The Government Shutdown Affected Agriculture, Too", on History News Network, 4 November 2013
"Ku Klux Klan, First" in Oxford Encyclopedia of American Social History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
Entries on "Violence in White Song," "Violence and Memory," and "Social Class and Memory" in New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, vol. 19 and 20
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011-2012).
"What's the Matter With South Carolina?" Government Gazette (September 2010): 153.
Entries on "Grace Lumpkin" and "Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin" in Joseph M. Flora and Amber Vogel, eds., Southern Writers: A New Biographical Directory
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006).
Contributor to Richard Zuczek, ed., The Greenwood Encyclopedia of the Reconstruction Era (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2006).
Contributor to Walter Edgar, ed., The South Carolina Encyclopedia (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006).
Contributor to William S. Powell, ed., North Carolina Handbook (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).
August 2022, “Fraudulent Bills of Lading in the Cotton Trade, 1865-1914,” Agricultural History Society Annual Meeting, Stavanger, Norway.
April 2022, “Roundtable: New Approaches to the Practices and Material Infrastructure of Finance,” Business History Conference, Mexico City.
November 2021, “Elephant Johnny and the Crimps: The Economic and Political Control of Labor on the New Orleans Waterfront, 1865-1874,” Southern Historical Association Annual Meeting, New Orleans.
October 2021, “Reappraising the Role of the Fugitive in British Anti-slavery: Moses Roper, 1835-1841,” British American Nineteenth Century Historians Annual Conference, Warwick.
September 2021, “Fugitive Network: Moses Roper Tours Ireland, 1838,” Breaking the Network: Infrastructure and Community (Fractures) in the Long Nineteenth Century conference, University College Cork, Cork.
October 2019, "Elephant Johnny and the Crimps: The Economic and Political Control of Labor on the New Orleans Waterfront, 1865-1874," Association of British American Nineteenth-Century Historians Annual Meeting, Edinburgh.
November 2017, "The Loose Cotton Economy of the New Orleans Waterfront in the Late Nineteenth Century," Hidden Capitalism: Beyond, Below and Outside the Visible Market conference,
Hagley Library and Museum, Wilmington, Delaware.
April 2017, "Fair to Middling: New York, New Orleans, and the Cotton Grading Scandal of 1906," Organization of American Historians Annual Meeting, New Orleans, Louisiana.
March 2015, "Bubonic Plague in New Orleans, 1914: An Initial Survey of the Victims," Scottish Association for the Study of America, Edinburgh.
January 2015, "The Politics of Ratproofing: Fighting Plague in New Orleans in the Progressive Era," Northumbria University History Department Research Seminar, Newcastle.
September 2014, "Rat Proofing the Gulf Coast: Bubonic Plague, Public Health, and Urban Life in New Orleans, 1914-1915," British American Nineteenth Century
Historians Annual Conference, Reading.
April 2014, Roundtable on "Where Is the Public History of Reconstruction?" Organization of American Historians Annual Conference, Atlanta, Georgia.
May 2013, "Rat Proofing the Gulf Coast: Bubonic Plague, Public Health, and Urban Life in New Orleans, 1914-1915," Department of American and Canadian Studies Research Seminar, University of Nottingham.
March 2013, "Rings of Trade in the Age of Futures: Cotton Exchanges in Liverpool, New York, and New Orleans, 1870-1914," Business History Conference, Columbus, Ohio.
November 2012, "The SHA and H-SOUTH: The New Southern Destination," Southern Historical Association Annual Meeting, Mobile, Alabama.
April 2012, Commentator on panel "Dark and Bloody: The Politics of Remembering Reconstruction," Organization of American Historians Annual Conference, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
October 2011, "Cornering Cotton: New Orleans Bulls, New York Bears, and the Power of Information," British American Nineteenth Century Historians Annual Conference, Cambridge.
May 2011, "Polanyi in the Piedmont: Peasant Livelihoods in the Reconstruction American South," Department of History Seminar, University of Edinburgh.
November 2010, "The Growth of Greenville and the Casualization of Black Labor, 1865-1880," Southern Historical Association Annual Meeting, Charlotte, North Carolina.
July 2010, "Directions for Post-Emancipation Studies in the American South," Rethinking Post-Slavery Conference, University of Liverpool.
March 2010, Race, Labor, and Citizenship in the Post-Emancipation South Conference, Charleston, South Carolina. (organized, chaired, commented)
January 2010, "After Slavery: In the Classroom," Workshop for University Teachers, Senate House, London (organized and presented).
October 2009, "Communities of Memory, Sites of Memory, Music of Memory: How Will New Orleans Remember Katrina?" Moving On: Conference on Memory and Trauma in History, Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana.
February 2009, "Browns Ferry Blues: Military Justice, Freedpeople's Testimony, and the Contest Over the End of the Civil War," Research Seminar Series, Marcus Cunliffe Centre for the Study of the American South, University of Sussex.
October 2008, "The Making of the Piedmont Working Class: Reconstruction, Redemption, and Textile Workers, 1865-1885," Wiles Colloquium, Rethinking Reconstruction: Race, Labour and Politics after the American Civil War, Queen's University, Belfast.
May 2008, "'A Foreign Friend Who Taught Me To Appreciate the Past of My Native State': Francis Butler Simkins, Gilberto Freyre, and Transnational Influences on Southern History in the 1920s," Association Française d'Études Américaines, Montpellier, France.
February 2008, "Drovers, Distillers, and Democrats: Economic and Political Change in Northern Greenville County, 1865 -1878," European Social Science History Conference, Lisbon, Portugal.
December 2007, "How W. E. B. Du Bois Won the United Daughters of the Confederacy Essay Contest," American History Colloquium, Queen's University Belfast.
November 2007, "Settling Scores: The Deep Roots of Racial Violence," Social Science History Association Annual Meeting, Chicago, Illinois.
October 2007, "After Reconstruction: Struggles over Race and Labor in the Carolinas," British American Nineteenth Century Historians Annual Conference, Cambridge.
September 2007, "Social Memory of Reconstruction in the South during the 1920s," Southern Studies Forum of the European Association for American Studies, Palacky University, Olomouc, Czech Republic.
March 2007, "Reconstruction and Public Memory in Anderson County, South Carolina, 1905-1920," Our Past Before Us: The Search for the South Carolina Upcountry Conference, Clemson University, Clemson, South Carolina.
February 2007, "Reconstruction's Legacy, Disfranchisement, and the Struggle for Voting Rights," America's 400th Anniversary: Voices from within the Veil Conference, Norfolk State University, Norfolk, Virginia.
January 2007, "Folk Culture and Historical Memory in the American South," Memory from Transdisciplinary Perspectives: Agency, Practices, and Mediations conference, Research Centre of Culture and Communication at the University of Tartu, Estonia.
October 2006, "How W. E. B. Du Bois Won the United Daughters of the Confederacy Essay Contest," American History Seminar, Institute for Historical Research, London.
November 2005, "The Returns of the Red Shirts: Historical Memory of the End of Reconstruction in South Carolina," American History Seminar, University of Cambridge.
November 2005, "From New York to the New South: Hiram F. Hover's Analysis of Race and Class, 1885-1889," Southern Historical Association Annual Meeting, Atlanta, Georgia.
October 2005, "'The First Anarchist That Ever Came to Atlanta': Hiram F. Hover from New York to the New South, 1885-1889," American Studies Seminar, University of Reading.
October 2005, "Reconstruction and Public Memory in Anderson County, South Carolina, 1905-1920," Association of British American Nineteenth Century Historians conference, Cambridge.
January 2005, "No Truly Moderate Position: Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin's Lost Novel and the Southern Front's Vision of Reconstruction," American Studies Research Seminar, University of Sussex.
January 2005, "Refugees From Reconstruction: African American Countermemory in a National Context," at American Historical Association Annual Meeting, Seattle, Washington.
October 2004, "Commemorating a Counterrevolution: South Carolina's Red Shirt Reunions in the Early Twentieth Century," Department of History Staff Seminar, Royal Holloway, University of London.
March 2003, "Redefining Reconstruction: The Emergence of Black Voting and the Historical Memory of Reconstruction in South Carolina," at The Citadel Conference on the Civil Rights Movement in South Carolina, Charleston, South Carolina.
January 2003, "Remembering Reconstruction Violence in the Progressive Era," at American Historical Association Annual Meeting, Chicago, Illinois.
November 2002, "Following the Gun: Creating Icons of White Supremacy in South Carolina," at American Studies Association Annual Meeting, Houston, Texas.
October 2002, "Lynch Law Reversed: The Lynching of Manse Waldrop," at Lynching and Racial Violence in America: Histories and Legacies, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia.
October 2000, "Roundtable: A County at the Crossroads: Chatham, North Carolina, 2000," at Oral History Association Annual Meeting, Durham, North Carolina.
March 2000, "Picnic, Parade, and Gender Politics at the 1909 Red Shirt Reunion," at Graduate Student Conference on Southern History, University of Mississippi, Oxford, Mississippi.
July 1999, "Some Considerations on the Material Culture of Lynching," at Southern Writers, Southern Writing Conference, University of Mississippi, Oxford, Mississippi.
October 1995, "'This Mob Will Surely Take My Life': Meaning in Lynching Ballads," at American Folklore Society Meeting, Lafayette, Louisiana.
October 1994, "Professional Musicians at White Top Folk Festival," at American Folklore Society meeting, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
April 1994, "Place Names and Narrative Knowledge in Brian Friel's Translations," at the Commonwealth and Post Colonial Studies Conference, Georgia Southern University, Statesboro, Georgia.
COLLEGE
2005-2007 , E-Learning Strategy Working Group
2005-2006 , Computer Users Advisory Group
2005-2007 , Web Steering Group
2007-2010 , University and College Union local branch membership secretary
2008-2013 , RHUL Green Team
2008-2013 , Academic Board
2009-2010 , College Website Redesign Group
2010-2013 , E-Learning Users Advisory Group
2011, University and College Union local branch chair
2011-2013 , Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Research Group
2014-2017 , Degree Programme Director for History and History & Politics
2015-2017 , Vice-President of Newcastle University and College Union
2017-2019, President of Newcastle University and College Union
2017-2020, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences Promotions Committee
2018-2020, Promotions Review Steering Group
2020-2023, Newcastle University Senate
DEPARTMENTAL
2021-2024, Head of Subject for History
2018-2019, History Review Steering Group
2016-2017, Deputy Degree Programme Director (V100 and VL12)
2014-2016, Degree Programme Director (V100 and VL12)
2013-2014 , library liaison for History
2005-2010 , webmaster
2004-2005, Careers Office liaison
2001-2002, co-president of Graduate History Society
2001-2003, graduate student representative on Graduate Studies Committee
2004-2013 , American History Seminar (co-convener), Institute for Historical Research, London.
2007-2014 , List editor for H-SOUTH
2007- , Association of British American Nineteenth Century Historians committee
2010-2019, Co-editor, American Nineteenth Century History
2016- , Advisory Board for Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies
Reviewed Book Manuscripts and Proposals
Ashgate, Routledge, Sage, University of Illinois Press, Oxford University Press, University of North Carolina Press, University of Arkansas Press, Yale University Press
Reviewed Article Manuscripts
Journal of American History, Business History Review, Southern Cultures, Patterns of Prejudice, Civil War History, Journal of American Studies, American Nineteenth Century History, Tennessee Historical Quarterly,
Labour History Review
Peer Review of Tenure and Promotion
John Jay College of Criminal Justice--CCNY, University of South Carolina
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