Georgia Historical Society

Program Faculty

Dr. Erskine Clarke, noted author and expert on religion and slavery in the American South, is Professor of American Religious History and Director of the Program in Presbyterian and Reformed History and Theology at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Georgia. Dr. Clarke is the author, most recently, of Dwelling Place: A Plantation Epic. This book was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in history, a National Book Critics Circle Award, and won the prestigious Bancroft Prize in 2006, awarded annually by Columbia University in New York to a work of exceptional merit in American history.

Dr. David Goldfield, noted expert in American urban history and the history of southern race relations, is Robert Lee Bailey Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He is the author of many books on the American South, two of which, Cotton Fields & Skyscrapers and Black, White, and Southern, were nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. His book Still Fighting the Civil War: The American South and Southern History received the Jules and Frances Landry Prize from the Southern Historical Association and was named by Choice as an Outstanding Non-Fiction Book.

Dr. John Michael Vlach, nationally recognized specialist in African-American folklife and culture is Professor of American Studies and Anthropology, Director of the Folklife Program, and Director of Graduate Studies at George Washington University. Dr. Vlach has concentrated his scholarship on aspects of the African Diaspora by conducting field research in Africa, the Caribbean, and across the American South. He is the author of ten books, including Back of the Big House: The Architecture of Plantation Slavery.

Cornelia Walker Bailey is a Sapelo Island native and resident of the historic Hog Hammock community, as well as a resident of Ossabaw Island's Pin Point community, whose ancestors once lived and worked on the island. Ms. Bailey is considered the keeper of the island's culture and history and the sage of Sapelo. She is the author of the cultural memoir God, Dr. Buzzard, and the Bolito Man: A Saltwater Geechee Talks About Life on Sapelo Island, Georgia, and is a direct descendant of Bilalie, the most famous and powerful enslaved African to inhabit the island.

Dr. Paul Pressly has served since 2005 as the Director of the Ossabaw Island Education Alliance. In that role, he spearheaded the development of "The Atlantic World and African American Life and Culture in the Georgia Lowcountry: 18th to the 20th Century," a Symposium to take place in Savannah in February 2008. A member of the Georgia Historical Society Board of Curators since 2004, he is a past headmaster of Savannah Country Day School and the author of a number of articles on Savannah and Georgia history.

Buddy Sullivan is the author of thirteen books and is recogniezed as the leading authority on the history of coastal Georgia. He is the author of Early Days on the Georgia Tidewater and From Beautiful Zion to Red Bird Creek: A History of Bryan County, Georgia (recipient of the Georgia Historical Society's Lilla M. Hawes Award in 2000), in addition to published works on nineteenth-century coastal Georgia agriculture. A native of Savannah and McIntosh County, Georgia, he is the Director of the Sapelo Island National Estuarine Research Reserve and has been closely affiliated with the Georgia Historical Society since 1992.

Vaughnette Goode-Walker, Interpretive Project Director for the Telfair’s Owens-Thomas House, will provide insights into the lives of the people associated with the house -- both free and enslaved.