Robert J. Norrell

“Up from History: When an Academic Historian Writes a Novel”

Dr. Robert J. Norrell is Professor of History and Bernadotte Schmitt Chair of Excellence at the University of Tennessee. He earned his B.A. and Ph.D. at the University of Virginia. Professor Norrell writes mainly about American race relations, including some books on the history of the American South. Three notable works of his are Reaping the Whirlwind: The Civil Rights Movement in Tuskegee, which won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award in 1986; “The House I Live In: Race in the American Century (2005),” an interpretive synthesis of race relations in twentieth-century America; and Up from History: the Life of Booker T. Washington (2009), a revisionist biography. Dr. Norrell is also the author of over 20 scholarly articles. He has given invited lectures at Heidelberg Oxford University, the University of Cambridge, the University of North Carolina, the University of Tübingen, and several other universities.