David Ballantyne

I am currently a lecturer in American History, the interim director of the David Bruce Centre for American Studies, and the staff representative for the American Studies Student Staff Voice Committee. I received my PhD (2014) from the University of Cambridge. Before coming to Keele in 2016, I held a held a postdoctoral research fellowship at Leiden University, where I worked on a project examining Louisiana during the Civil War and Reconstruction.

I focus on nineteenth and twentieth century United States history, with a particular emphasis on the American South, politics, race relations, social policy, and memory. My first book, New Politics in the Old South: Ernest F. Hollings in the Civil Rights Era (University of South Carolina Press, 2016) probed South Carolina Democrat Ernest F. Hollings’s negotiation of southern politics from the 1950s through the 1970s, a period of remarkable regional political, economic, and economic transformation.

I am currently pursuing two research projects. The first, a study of central Louisiana between roughly 1860 and 1880, scrutinises the transition between the region’s wartime experience and Reconstruction, and the extent and viability of black political and economic advances in the rural Deep South. My other project examines the behaviour of moderate southern politicians from the 1960s to the 1980s, with a closer focus on social welfare policy.

I am especially interested in supervising undergraduate and postgraduate students on topics relating to politics, race relations, welfare, or memory from the Civil War era onwards.