W&M history professor receives 2021 HistoryMakers award
Adrienne Petty, associate professor of history at W&M, was awarded in May with a 2021 Faculty Innovations in Pedagogy and Teaching Fellowship, presented by The HistoryMakers, the nation’s largest African American video oral history archive.
Petty was one of seven recipients for the fellowship, which is now in its second year. According to a press release, the fellowship is designed to foster classroom innovation and teaching and to diversify curricula while furthering student learning and research skills during the upcoming academic year. Recipients receive a $7,500 award and an opportunity to demonstrate how faculty can creatively incorporate The HistoryMakers digital archive into a semester course and syllabus.
The fellowship’s inaugural program was established in 2020 at the University of Virginia under the leadership of Associate Dean Michael Gerard Mason, director of the Luther Porter Jackson Black Cultural Center, and with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Petty’s COLL 200 course, “Telling About the South: Coming of Age,” will be offered in the fall and exposes students to writings and interviews from The HistoryMakers digital archive and other cultural production by southerners—particularly African American, white and Indigenous southerners—who have wrestled with the history of the region and the nation. Her students will have access to The HistoryMakers digital archive and other archival resources to complete an original research paper, podcast or Sway presentation about an aspect of southern history that interests them.
