Timothy Tyson - Teaching Career

Teaching Career

Tyson began his teaching career at Duke University, where he taught "United States History from the New Deal to the Present" for two years while finishing his doctorate in 1994. During that time, he was named Research Fellow at the Center for Ethical Studies at Duke University, for his work, "Dynamite: A Story from the Second Reconstruction in South Carolina," which was later published in Glenda Gilmore, et al., Jumpin' Jim Crow: The New Southern Political History (Princeton University Press, 2000.) He won the Mattie Russell Teaching Fellowship for his course, "And Still I Rise: African American Culture in the Twentieth Century."

In 1994, he became assistant professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he taught "Introduction to Afro-American History," "Race and American Politics," and "Freedom Stories: Writing Movement History." He won the Lilly Teaching Award for 1996-97.

With three colleagues, professors Craig Werner and Steve Kantrowitz, and graduate assistant Danielle McGuire, Tyson led a series of busloads of students from Madison to Chicago, Illinois and Nashville, Tennessee, and then on to Birmingham, Selma, and Montgomery, Alabama; Jackson, Hattiesburg, and Duck Hill, Mississippi; and New Orleans, Louisiana, to explore and discuss their histories. Called Freedom Ride: The Sites and Sounds of the Civil Rights Movement, it won the 2002 Best Course Award from the North American Association of Summer Sessions. Tyson became full professor of Afro-American Studies. From 2002 to the present, Tyson was named Distinguished Lecturer by the Organization of American Historians. Tyson was selected as a John Hope Franklin Senior Fellow at the National Humanities Center in 2004-05.

He serves as Senior Research Scholar at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, with secondary appointments in the Duke Divinity School and the Department of History. At the Divinity School, he teaches about race, religion and civil rights in the South. He also has a position in the Department of American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

In 2007, Tyson taught an experimental course entitled "The South in Black and White," which met at Hayti Heritage Center in downtown Durham, for students of Duke University, North Carolina Central University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In the fall of 2008, Tyson and Mary D. Williams, a leading gospel singer, led a community-based course in Wilmington, called "Wilmington in Black and White." Meeting at the historic Williston School, participants explored the ways that Southern history and culture may illuminate efforts at racial reconciliation and healing in one community.