Dennis C. Dickerson, Ph.D., is the James M. Lawson, Jr. Professor of History at Vanderbilt University where he has taught since 1999. Previously, he taught at Williams College as Stanfield Professor of History. He earned the B.A. from Lincoln University (Pennsylvania), the M.A. and Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis, and the M.Div. from Vanderbilt University.
He has written books: Out of the Crucible: Black Steelworkers in Western Pennsylvania, 1875-1980 (Albany, State University of New York, 1986), Militant Mediator: Whitney M. Young, Jr. (Lexington, University Press of Kentucky, 1998), African American Preachers and Politics: The Careys of Chicago (Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 2010), and The African Methodist Episcopal Church: A History (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2020). He is completing another book on William Stuart Nelson. He has received fellowships and grants from the American Academy in Berlin, the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Rockefeller Foundation.
Dr. Dickerson is an itinerant elder in the African Methodist Episcopal Church and served as pastor of three congregations in Massachusetts, New York, and Tennessee. He was elected and reelected as a General Officer between 1988 and 2012 and published during his incumbency Religion, Race and Region: Research Notes in AME Church History (Nashville, AME Sunday School Union, 1995), A Liberated Past: Exploration in AME Church History (Nashville, AME Sunday School Union, 2003), and African Methodism and its Wesleyan Heritage: Reflections on AME Church History (Nashville, AME Sunday Union, 2009).
Dennis C. Dickerson 