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POSITION, ADDRESS, PHONE, FAX, AND E-MAIL

Professor of History

Department of History

Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Blacksburg, VA 24061

Phone: (540) 231-8376; fax (540) 231-8724; pwallens@vt.edu
 

HIGHER EDUCATION

Ph.D., Johns Hopkins University (U.S. history), 1973

B.A., Columbia University (U.S. history), 1966
 

RECENT BOOKS

Higher Education and the Civil Rights Movement: White Supremacy, Black Southerners, and College Campuses. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, forthcoming November 2007. Edited essays, mostly by senior scholars.

Cradle of America: Four Centuries of Virginia History. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007. xvii + 476 pages; 84 illustrations.

Virginia’s Civil War. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005. xii + 303 pages. Original essays, mostly by junior scholars, co-edited with Bertram Wyatt-Brown.

Blue Laws and Black Codes: Conflict, Courts, and Change in Twentieth-Century Virginia. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004. Cloth and paper; xiv + 270 pages. 

From VPI to State University: President T. Marshall Hahn Jr. and the Transformation of Virginia Tech, 1962–1974. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2004. xx + 444 pages; 32 illustrations. Co-authored with Warren H. Strother.

Tell the Court I Love My Wife: Race, Marriage, and Law—An American History. New York: Palgrave Macmillan/ St. Martin’s Press, 2002. xii + 305 pages. Paperback edition (slightly revised) 2004.
 

 

RECENT ESSAYS AND BOOK CHAPTERS

“Black Southerners and Nonblack Universities: The Process of Desegregating Southern Higher Education, 1935–1965,” in Higher Education and the Civil Rights Movement: White Supremacy, Black Southerners, and College Campuses, ed. Peter Wallenstein. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, forthcoming November 2007.

“Reconstruction, Segregation, and Miscegenation: Interracial Marriage and the Law in the Lower South, 1865–1900.” American Nineteenth-Century History 6:1 (March 2005): 57–76.

“To Sit or Not to Sit: The Supreme Court of the United States and the Civil Rights Movement in the Upper South." Journal of Supreme Court History 29, no. 2 (2004): 145–62.

“Higher Education and Civil Rights: South Carolina, 1860s–1960s.” History of Higher Education Annual 23 (2003–04): 1–22.

“Higher Education and the Civil Rights Movement: Desegregating the University of North Carolina.” In Warm Ashes: Issues in Southern History at the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century, ed. Winfred B. Moore Jr., Kyle S. Sinisi, and David H. White Jr., 280–300. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003.

“Interracial Marriage on Trial: Loving v. Virginia (1967).” In Race on Trial: Law and Justice in American History, ed. Annette Gordon-Reed, 177–96. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

 

SELECTED RECENT CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS

"Constructing a History of Virginia," Virginia Forum, Richmond, VA, April 2007

"Higher Education in Civil War Virginia," Civil War Weekend, Blacksburg, VA, March 2007.

“Segregation, Desegregation, and Higher Education in Virginia,” Policy History Conference, Charlottesville, VA, June 2006.

“Desegregating State Universities in the Upper South: Delaware and Maryland, 1935–1970,” annual meeting of the History of Education Society, Baltimore, MD, October 2005.

“Telling Their Own Stories: African Americans and the Civil War in Virginia,” at the Conference on African Americans in the Civil War, Petersburg, VA, May 2005.

 "Brown v. Board of Education and Segregated Universities:  From Kluger to Klarman - Toward Creating a Literature on King Color, Federal Courts, and Undergraduate Admissions," annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians, Boston, MA, March 2004.

 

RECENT AWARDS AND RECOGNITION FOR SCHOLARSHIP AND TEACHING

Diggs Teaching Scholar Award for 2005–06. Such awards are made to three Virginia Tech faculty members each year. My theme: “undergraduate research at a research university.” 

Named to the Organization of American Historians’ Distinguished Lectureship Program (2005). 

The Hughes Gossett Prize from the Supreme Court Historical Society for the best article published in the Journal of Supreme Court History in 2004, for “To Sit or Not to Sit: The Supreme Court of the United States and the Civil Rights Movement in the Upper South.”

2004 Sturm Award for Excellence in Faculty Research, from the Virginia Tech chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, for Tell the Court I Love My Wife (2002) and Blue Laws and Black Codes (2004).

2004 Scholar Award in History, from the Virginia Social Science Association.