Dr. J. Russell Hawkins
Associate Professor of Humanities and History
J. Russell (Rusty) Hawkins graduated from Wheaton College (IL) in 1999. After taking an M.A. in American History from Montana State University, Rusty served for a year with AmeriCorps as a literacy program coordinator in the public schools of Boston, Massachusetts. He earned his Ph.D. in American History from Rice University in 2009.
In 2013 Rusty and his co-editor, Philip Luke Sinitiere published Christians and the Color Line: Race and Religion after Divided by Faith (Oxford University Press). The book was drawn from papers delivered at a 2010 conference that Rusty organized at Indiana Wesleyan University to commemorate the tenth anniversary of Michael O. Emerson and Christian Smith's book, Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America.
Rusty is currently finishing a book manuscript titled Sacred Segregation: White Evangelicals and Civil Rights in South Carolina, which is under contract with Louisiana State University Press. The book examines the way that white Christians' religious beliefs caused them to work against the civil rights movement in the South. He has received research grants for his book from the Southern Baptist Library and Archives, Baylor University's Institute for Oral History, the University of South Carolina's Institute for Southern Studies and Indiana Wesleyan University's Lilly Scholarship Fund.
Rusty has begun research on a new project examining the white flight of churches from urban America in the second half of the twentieth century.
Rusty and his wife, Kristi, have two sons, Caleb and Micah. In addition to spending time with his wife and boys, he enjoys reading (obviously), running (not as often as he should), and rooting for his favorite sports teams (the Kansas Jayhawks and the Kansas City Chiefs).
Last updated: 05/26/2015