Finally, a fall 2022 Reinhardt history blogpost! Forgive me, but I’ve been busier than a one-armed Rings of Power forger. But herewith an overview, in his own words, of Reinhardt University’s new History Post-Doc–the first in recent memory: Dr. Andrew Jones!

“I’m a jack of all fields, master of Scottish Religious History. I received my PhD from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland in 2018. My research for the last eight years has focused on religion, identity, and race in modern Scotland the Scottish Diaspora communities of the Atlantic World. I’ve published articles in Scottish Church History, International Journal of Bahamian Studies, and elsewhere and in 2022 published my first book – The Revival of Evangelicalism: Mission and Piety in the Victorian Church of Scotland – with Edinburgh University Press. Along with the postdoc project (see below), I’m also continuing to research the life and legacy of a famous 20th century Scottish-American Presbyterian pastor (and U.S. Senate Chaplain) named Peter Marshall. An article on his views on race and religion in the American South will be published in the Journal of Presbyterian History in 2023 and I hope to ultimately publish the first scholarly biography of Marshall to date.

While I love my research, I’m most at home in the history classroom. I’ve had the privilege to teach undergraduate and graduate courses in U.S. History, World History, Modern European History, History of Christianity, and African History. Along with readings and lectures, I love to use podcasts to complement and accentuate different assignments and – perhaps above all – highly prize group analysis and discussion of primary source documents. My students have typically reviewed me as “tough but fair.” My philosophy is that it should be hard to ace my class but also hard to fail it. You’ve got to work hard for the “A” but you’ve also got to pretty much check out and miss several major assignments to fail.

The Postdoc Situation: The NEH Postdoctoral Research Fellowship focuses on the Cherokee Voices Project, which seeks to re-center Cherokee narratives by transcribing and digitizing a set of Cherokee claims against the U.S. Government from the early 1840s. I’ll be working under the leadership of W. Jeff Bishop, the Director of the Funk Heritage Center and the former president of the Georgia chapter of the Trail of Tears Association. The “on the ground” work will primarily involve a) Hiring a team of undergraduate student researchers, b) Educating, leading, and managing those researchers in the transcription and digitization of the claims documents, and c) Interpreting the narratives/data we encounter in order to reach both general and scholarly audiences.”