Rate My Professor Anne Parsons

Anne Parsons is an Associate Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where she serves as Director of Public History and Graduate Program Director for Museum Studies. She is also Affiliate Faculty in Jewish Studies. Parsons earned her Ph.D. in History from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2013, with a dissertation titled 'Re-institutionalizing America: The Politics of Mental Health and Incarceration, 1945-1985.' She holds an M.A. in Public History from New York University in 2005 and a B.A. with honors in Classics from Smith College in 2000. Prior to her current position, which began as Assistant Professor in Fall 2013 and advanced to Associate Professor, she served as Visiting Instructor at the University of Illinois at Chicago from 2012 to 2013. Earlier professional roles include Education Director at Dyckman Farmhouse Museum in New York from 2005 to 2006, Archival Assistant at New York University Libraries' Tamiment Library in 2005, and Researcher at American History Workshop from 2004 to 2006. She also directed the Museum Studies Program starting in Spring 2014.

Parsons' research interests encompass public history, carceral studies, difficult histories, history of social medicine, history of gender and sexuality, Holocaust studies, modern U.S. history, and museum studies. Her major publication is the book From Asylum to Prison: Deinstitutionalization and the Rise of Mass Incarceration after 1945 (University of North Carolina Press, 2018), which co-won the 2019 Disability History Association Outstanding Book Award. Key articles include 'From Asylum to Prison: The Story of Lincoln, Illinois' in the Journal of Illinois History (2012), 'When the Erotic Becomes Illicit: Struggles over Displaying Queer History at a Mainstream Museum' in Radical History Review (2012), and 'Gender Crossroads: Representations of Gender Transgressions in Chicago’s Press, 1850–1920' in Out in Chicago: LGBT History at the Crossroads (2011). She received the Open Society Foundations Soros Justice Fellowship in 2015, a New Faculty Grant from UNCG in 2015, and a North Carolina Humanities Council Mini-Grant in 2014. In 2024, she was awarded a $17,000 grant from the North Carolina Department of Cultural and Natural Resources for the 'Limits of Freedom' America 250 project, collaborating with UNCG Libraries and community partners on an exhibit about free and enslaved African Americans in Guilford and Rockingham Counties. Governor Roy Cooper appointed her to the North Carolina Council on the Holocaust in 2023. Parsons curated the National Library of Medicine exhibit 'Care and Custody: Past Responses to Mental Health,' which toured multiple states, and contributed to projects like a Ukraine history exhibit and the Digital Library on American Slavery North Carolina People Not Property site.