Courses Taught
History 100: Modern Times
History 201: History of the U.S. before 1865
History 202: History of the U.S. since 1865
History 322: Southern Lives
History 325: Revolutionary America
History 327: The Old South
History 329: The New South
History 352: Junior Tutorial in History
History 393: America's Civil War
History 394: Reconstructing the South
History 444: Independent Research in History
Humanities 202: The Modern World

Biography
John C. Willis was trained in United States history and specializes in the American South. Professor Willis regularly offers history courses on the region and its place within the nation, as well as an advanced American studies course, "Southern Lives," which explores Southern culture through characters in biography, autobiography, and fiction. In 1998 he introduced an on-line version of "America's Civil War," combining an innovative pedagogy and an extensive electronic archive of nineteenth-century documents and images. The following year, Professor Willis began offering another World Wide Web-based seminar, "Reconstructing the South," with support from the Mellon Foundation and the Associated Colleges of the South.

Professor Willis's research interests also focus on the Southern past. His most recent work, Forgotten Time: The Yazoo-Mississippi Delta after the Civil War, was published by the University Press of Virginia in 2000. It has received favorable reviews and won the Mississippi Historical Society’s 2001 McLemore Prize for the year’s best book on the state’s past.

Before joining the History faculty at the University of the South, he co-edited and contributed to The Edge of the South: Life in Nineteenth-Century Virginia. In his current project, tentatively titled The Roads From Appomattox: National Origins of Southern Reconstruction, Professor Willis explores the path toward Congressional intervention in the postbellum South.

Professor Willis has published in The Journal of American History, The American Historical Review, Southern Cultures, and The Journal of Southern History, and has presented papers drawn from his research to the Organization of American Historians and the Southern Historical Association. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Historical Association, the Mellon and duPont foundations, and other philanthropic agencies.