Richard Pierce's Home Page

219 O'Shaughnessey Hall
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556

Phone: 574.631.5666
Fax: 574.631.3587
Email: pierce.15@nd.edu

Congratulations to Richard Pierce, Chair of the Department of Africana Studies and Associate Professor of History, who has won the Kaneb Teaching Award for excellence in undergraduate teaching. He received the award along with 25 other Arts and Letters faculty who have taught at the university for five or more years. The Kaneb Teaching Award reflects Professor Pierce's accomplishment as an academic dedicated his field and his undergraduate students. Congratulations again to Professor Pierce for this great honor!

Richard Pierce specializes in African American, Urban, and Civil Rights history. A member of the Notre Dame faculty since 1996, Dr. Pierce examines social and political protest in urban environments. In July 2002, Dr. Pierce accepted an appointment as the Associate Director of African and African American Studies. He was a primary architect in the development of the Erskine A. Peters Dissertation Fellowship Program. Additionally, he convened and organized the African and African American Program’s first symposium on “African American Women’s Labor” in 2000. Dr. Richard Pierce was appointed as the inaugural chair of the Department of Africana Studies at the University of Notre Dame in 2005.

Professor Pierce earned his doctorate at Indiana University. His first manuscript, Polite Protest: The Political Economy of Race in Indianapolis, 1920-1970, was published by Indiana University Press. He was a consultant for the “Faith and Community Initiative” of the Project on Religion and Urban Culture” at POLIS Research Center and For Gold and Glory, an award-winning documentary that depicted the African American automobile racing league of the 1920s. Dr. Pierce has published articles and essays that have appeared in the Journal of Urban History, The State of Indiana history 2000, Robert Taylor, ed., Chicago Tribune, and National Public Radio. Most recently, his essay, In Pursuit of Civil Discourse in the Academy, was featured in Diverse Magazine, formerly known as Black Issues in Higher Education.

Currently, Dr. Pierce is researching the processes by which African American families and institutions taught Jim Crow to their children in the United States during the time period 1895-1965. The resulting volume, tentatively titled, Teaching Jim Crow, will examine the methods and strategies African Americans employed to preserve self-esteem within a system designed to dehumanize. Dr. Pierce is presently seeking interviews with parents, teachers, and community leaders who reared children during the Jim Crow segregation era to enrich his research.

In recent years, Dr. Pierce has been awarded multiple fellowship and academic appointments. These include: Joan D. Kroc Institute for Institute for Peace Fellow (2002); Carl E. Koch, Jr., Assistant Professor of History Chair (2000), a Ford Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for African American Urban Studies and the Economy (CAUSE) at Carnegie Mellon University (2000); and was a member of the Indiana Delegation to Capitol Hill in support of the NEH (1998). In 2004, he was elected the Indiana Historical Society board of directors.