Susan Ashmore

Susan Ashmore is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of History at Oxford College of Emory University, where she joined the faculty in the fall of 2000 and was appointed to the endowed professorship in 2017. In the History faculty, she earned a BA from the University of Texas in 1983, an MA from the University of Virginia in 1989, and a PhD from Auburn University in 1999. Her research specializations include the twentieth-century U.S. South, African American struggles for freedom and civil rights from 1866 to 1965, federal anti-poverty programs such as President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty, the implementation of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act in Alabama's Black Belt, and the Wyatt v. Stickney case originating in 1971, which advanced civil rights for the mentally ill through expansions of the Fourteenth Amendment while revealing intersections of gender, race, class, religion, public health, and state power in the modernizing South.

Ashmore authored Carry It On: The War on Poverty and the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama, 1964–1972 (University of Georgia Press, 2008), which won the Francis Butler Simkins Award from the Southern Historical Association and the Willie Lee Rose Publication Prize from the Southern Association of Women Historians, both in 2009. She contributed 'Going Back to Selma: Organizing for Change after the Selma March to Montgomery' to The War on Poverty: A New Grassroots History, 1964–1980 (University of Georgia Press, 2011) and 'Making Her Way in Wallace Country: Lurleen Burns Wallace' to Alabama Women: Their Lives and Times (University of Georgia Press, 2017). Her courses encompass Foundations of American Society: Beginnings to 1877, American Civil Rights History, Modern American History since 1945, The New South: 1877 to the Present, America in the 1960s, and Oral History: Engaging with Living Subjects. Honors include the Mizell Award for Superior Performance in furthering the Education of Students (2002–2003), the Fleming Award for excellence in teaching and service (2008), and the Emory Williams Award (2017). She attended the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute on African American Struggles for Freedom and Civil Rights, 1866–1965, at Harvard University's W. E. B. Du Bois Institute in 2003 and has co-led student trips to civil rights sites in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi.

Professional Email: sashmor@emory.edu