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Department of History College of Arts and Sciences

Tennant McWilliams

Professor and Dean Emeritus

Research and Teaching Fields: American foreign affairs, recent America, American higher education

Education:

  • B.A., Birmingham-Southern College, 1965
  • M.A., University of Alabama, 1967
  • Ph.D., University of Georgia, 1973

UAB Service, 1974 – 2010

  • 1978-1980: Director of Graduate Programs, History Department
  • 1981-1984: Chair, Department of History
  • 1984-1989: Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs
  • 1989-1990: Interim Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs
  • 1991-2008: Dean, School of Social and Behavioral Sciences

Select Publications

  • Hannis Taylor: New Southerner as American. University of Alabama Press, 1978.
  • The New South Faces the World: Foreign Affairs and the Southern Sense of Self. Louisiana State University Press, 1988. Paperback 2006.
  • New Lights in the Valley: The Emergence of UAB. University of Alabama Press, 2008.
  • The Chaplain’s Conflict: Good and Evil in a War Hospital. Texas A&M University Press, 2012.
  • Dixie Heretic: The Civil Rights Odyssey of Renwick C. Kennedy. Forthcoming. University of Alabama Press, 2023.

Select Presentations

  • “James H. Blount and Southern Anti-Imperialism: A ‘Revisionist’ View,” Organization of American Historians, New York, NY, 1986.
  • “Searching Again for the Southern ‘Identity’: In Foreign Affairs,” Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, 1993.
  • “Urban Higher Education as an Engine of Community-Based Economic Change,” University of Salamanca, University of Valladolid, and University of Madrid,1992. Sponsored by the Higher Education Committee of the European Community (EC) and the United Nations (UN).
  • “Reinventing the American University,” Conference on the Future of the University, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, 1992.

Select Grants and Fellowships

  • National Endowment for the Humanities, 1975-1976
  • National Endowment for the Humanities, 1982-1983
  • Pew Charitable Trusts, 1993-1997

Select Honors

  • Phi Kappa Phi
  • Phi Alpha Theta
  • Chair, Alabama Higher Education Partnership
  • President, Alabama Historical Association