History Department
Sarah Thuesen
Associate Professor of History
Office
Archdale-208
+1 (336) 3162287
thuesensc@guilford.edu
Biography
Sarah Thuesen has taught at Guilford College since the fall of 2012. A historian of the twentieth-century United States, she has published and presented widely on the history of race, gender, and social justice struggles in the American South.
Her book, Greater than Equal: African American Struggles for Schools and Citizenship in North Carolina, 1919-1965 (University of North Carolina Press, 2013), won both the 2013 North Caroliniana Society Book Award and the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association’s 2014 Ragan Old North State Award for Nonfiction.
She has interests in the fields of public history and oral history and enjoys involving students in related work. A former visiting scholar at the University of North Carolina’s Southern Oral History Program, she also has served on the North Carolina Historic Highway Marker Advisory Committee. At Guilford, she has worked closely with its chapter of the national consortium, Universities Studying Slavery, and chaired a committee that created a campus historic marker dedicated to Lavina Curry, a free Black operative on the Underground Railroad.
She values Guilford’s core mission of liberal arts education and is passionate about creating new paths for students to engage in interdisciplinary and collaborative discovery. Having taught several courses in medical and public health history during her time at Guilford, she was among the team of faculty who created Guilford’s new minor in the Health Humanities.
A former fellow of the Spencer Foundation and the National Academy of Education, she holds a B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Education
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Ph.D., 2003
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Master of Art, 1997
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Bachelor of Art, 1995
Selected Scholarship
Greater Than Equal: African American Struggles for Schools and Citizenship in North Carolina, 1919-1965. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013.
“‘I Got it with the Mother’s Milk’: Guion Griffis Johnson, Southern History, and the Boundaries of Womanhood.” In North Carolina Women: Their Lives and Times, Vol. 2, ed. Michele Gillespie and Sally McMillen, 191-214. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015.
“Learning from the Long Civil Rights Movement’s First Generation: Virginia Foster Durr,” an edited and introduced oral history selection. Southern Cultures 16 (Summer 2010): 72-89.
“‘Everything Changed, But Ain’t Nothing Changed’: Recovering a Generation of Southern Activists for Economic Justice.” Southern Cultures 14 (Fall 2008): 142-152.
“Taking the Vows of Southern Liberalism: Guion and Guy Johnson and the Evolution of an Intellectual Partnership.” The North Carolina Historical Review 74 (July 1997): 284-324.