Faculty & Staff

Anthony Parent

Anthony Parent (PhD, UCLA) is Professor of History and American Ethnic Studies. He teaches American, African and World History. His scholarly focus areas are African America, Colonial America, and the History of Sexuality. His current research includes the transformation of Virginia Slave society, a history of slave rebellion, and narrative and memory of African-American service during the American Revolution. He serves on the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts (MESDA) Advisory Board and is assisting the museum in its interpretation of rooms where Harriet Jacobs lived. Parent is author of Foul Means: The Formation of a Slave Society in Virginia, 1660-1740; Where Harriet Jacobs Lived,” and “Verses for Reel (Real): Corn Shucking Songs and Public Poetics; and he co-authored Old Dominion New Commonwealth: A History of Virginia, 1607-2007. Most recently, he is coeditor of Historical Trauma and American Indian and African American Resilience.

Jefferson Holdridge

Jefferson Holdridge (PhD, University College, Dublin) has had a career-long interest in the aesthetics of landscape. Among his relevant publications, he has written a critical book entitled Those Mingled Seas: The Poetry of W.B. Yeats, the Beautiful and the Sublime (2000) as well as recent essays entitled “Landscape and Family in the Eighteenth Century” Yeats in Context, ed. David Holdeman and Ben Levitas (Cambridge University Press, 2010); “The Wolf Tree: Culture and Nature in Paula Meehan’s Dharmakaya and Panting Rain” An Sionnach: Special Issue on Paula Meehan, ed. Jody Allen-Randolph (Volume 5: Spring/Fall 2010); “Dark Outlines, Grey Stone: Nature, Home and the Foreign in Lady Morgan’s The Wild Irish Girl and William Carleton’s The Black Prophet,” ‘Out of the Earth’: Ecocritical Readings of Irish Texts, ed. Christine Cusick (Cork UP, 2010); and “The One Loved Form: Nature, Myth, and Instinct in Irish Literature,” Writing Modern Ireland: South Carolina Review, A Special Number, 43.1 (Fall 2010). He is the Director at Wake Forest University Press and Associate Professor of English at WFU.

Alessandra Beasley Von Burg

Alessandra Beasley Von Burg (Ph.D., University of Pittsburgh)explores how political and philosophical theories of citizenship can benefit from a rhetorical perspective to explain issues of nationality, identity, membership status and practice play out in the public sphere. Her research focuses on developing new perspectives on citizenship in post-national contexts. She believes in responsible scholarship that explores politically salient issues and analyzes them for their potential impact on the people involved. Dr. Von Burg sees her role as a rhetorical critic who pushes boundaries of rhetorical theories to highlight, explore and understand scenarios where people are creating new meanings and practices. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication.