Robert J. Norrell

I am a native of Hazel Green, Alabama, near Huntsville, where I grew up on a 230-acre farm I try not to romanticize farm life, because there was nothing romantic about all the work required—or the difficulty in working for my father. But my farm background surely influenced my imagination—"the jades and olives and emeralds among the crops and grass and leaves and of the accents of gold and ginger and bronze from the soil and trees and animals.”

Growing up in Alabama in the 1960s, I learned by observing the intense feeling about the civil rights movement that race was the most important issue in my world. My parents often argued about race and the big personalities engaged in the current conflicts. I took along a certain preoccupation with race when I went to the University of Virginia during the 1970s. There several professors helped me gain a much better understanding of our nation's struggle with race. I acquired new insight into white bigotry, including my father's, and I gained a deep admiration for the African Americans who challenged it. By my third year in college, I knew that I wanted to make a career of writing and teaching about America's racial past.

In the 1880s and 1990s, I taught at Birmingham-Southern College and the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. In 1984-85, I went as a Mellon Fellow at the University of Cambridge. Since 1998, I have held the Bernadotte Schmitt Chair of Excellence at the University of Tennessee. In 2010-11, I was the Fulbright Distinguished Chair in American Studies at the University of Tuebingen, Germany.