John C. Inscoe is University Professor Emeritus and the Albert B. Saye Professor of History, Emeritus, in the Department of History at the University of Georgia. One of the leading scholars in the fields of Appalachian and southern history, he is the author of several books, has served as secretary-treasurer of the Southern Historical Association, and is the founding editor of the New Georgia Encyclopedia.
Born to Linwood St. Clair Inscoe Jr. and Harriet Cunningham on November 3, 1951, John grew up with his two brothers in Morganton, North Carolina. His father, a World War II (1941-1945) fighter pilot and prisoner of war, worked as a mechanical engineer at Drexel Furniture Company, and his mother was a leader in the First Presbyterian Church. In 1970 Inscoe enrolled at Davidson College, earning a B.A. in 1974. For the next four years, he taught at Darlington School in Rome where he met Jane Ransom Hawkins, whom he married on August 13, 1977. In 1978 John and Jane moved to Chapel Hill so that John could pursue a graduate degree in history at the University of North Carolina. He completed his Ph.D. under the tutelage of William L. Barney, a prominent Civil War era scholar, in 1985.
Inscoe is a prolific scholar, having written five monographs, edited eleven books, and penned over forty articles, essays, or book chapters. With the publication of his first book, Mountain Masters: Slavery and the Sectional Crisis in Western North Carolina (1989), Inscoe emerged as a prominent figure in the field of Appalachian studies. The winner of the Weatherford Award for Nonfiction and the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award, Mountain Masters shed significant light on the internal political and economic dynamics of antebellum western North Carolina and demonstrated how slavery connected that region to the Deep South’s cotton economy. When combined with The Heart of Confederate Appalachia: Western North Carolina in the Civil War (2000), which he co-authored with Gordon B. McKinney, Inscoe profoundly reshaped scholars’ understanding of antebellum and Civil War era Appalachia.
An award-winning teacher, Inscoe joined the Department of History at UGA as a temporary instructor in 1984. Hired as an assistant professor in 1988, his excellence in the classroom and as a researcher earned him the title of Distinguished University Professor in 2005 and the Albert B. Saye Professorship of History in 2010. His popular courses such as Appalachia on Film, American Lives, and Multicultural Georgia, influenced his books, including the award-winning Writing the South through the Self: Explorations in Southern Autobiography (2011) and Movie-Made Appalachia: History, Hollywood, and the Highland South (2020). In the former, his affinity for literature led him to the memoirs or semi-memoirs of southern writers like Lillian Smith, Thomas Wolfe, and others he taught in the classroom. In Movie-Made Appalachia, several of Inscoe’s loves—film, history, and teaching—intersected. Both monographs begin with an essay reflecting the projects’ origins in courses he taught.
Equally important, Inscoe mentored countless graduate students. His popular community studies graduate seminar launched dozens of theses and dissertations. During his tenure at UGA, he directed to completion seventeen Ph.D. dissertations and served on numerous thesis and dissertation committees. To honor his mentorship, many of his former Ph.D. students contributed essays to Southern Communities: Identity, Conflict, and Memory in the American South (2019), a celebration of Inscoe’s influence as a scholar, teacher, and mentor.
Acknowledged by his peers as one of the hardest working—and nicest—people in academia, Inscoe also volunteered his time to several organizations. As a doctoral student, Inscoe presented his first conference paper at the Appalachian Studies Association meeting in Pipestem, West Virginia, in 1983. It was the beginning of a fruitful relationship. He presented five more times at their meetings and served in a variety of official positions, including editor of the organization’s Appalink newsletter and president in 1995-1996. In 1989 he became editor of the Georgia Historical Society’s Georgia Historical Quarterly, a position that he held until 2000. In 1989 he worked as visiting managing editor of the Southern Historical Association’s Journal of Southern History and served as the secretary-treasurer of that organization between 2000 and 2014.
In 1999 Inscoe became the founding editor of the New Georgia Encyclopedia, the nation’s first born-digital state encyclopedia. He won the American Association for State and Local History’s 2012 Leadership in History Award of Merit for The Civil War in Georgia, a compilation of articles from the encyclopedia. Inscoe concluded his editorship at New Georgia Encyclopedia in 2022.
Inscoe’s commitment to research, teaching, and service made him the recipient of several lifetime achievement awards. In 2005 Inscoe received the Governor’s Award in the Humanities. Seven years later the Georgia Association of Historians presented him with the Hugh McCall Award, an honor given every three years to a historian “in recognition of scholarly attainment, excellence in teaching, and/or encouragement of the study of history.” The Georgia Historical Society also commended Inscoe’s work as a scholar and editor, giving him the John MacPherson Berrien Lifetime Achievement Award in 2016 and commemorating his tenure as editor of the Georgia Historical Quarterly by creating the Inscoe Award in 2018 for the best article published in the journal each year. In honor of his longtime service to southern Appalachia and its history, Inscoe received the Appalachian Studies Association’s 2019 Cratis D. Williams/James S. Brown Service Award, which recognizes “an individual who has made exemplary contributions to Appalachia, Appalachian studies, and/or the Appalachian Studies Association.”
Inscoe retired from teaching at UGA in 2019, but his influence remains very present even as he enjoys more time with his beloved wife and their children, Meg and Clay.
