• University of Kentucky College of Arts and Sciences Promotion of Diversity and Inclusion Award

Vanessa M. Holden is an assistant professor of History and African American and Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky. Dr. Holden’s current book project, tentatively titled, Surviving Southampton: Gender and Community the Southampton Rebellion of 1831 (University of Illinois Press), explores the contributions that African American women and children made to Nat Turner’s Rebellion. Her writing has been published in Slavery and Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies, Perspectives on History, Process: A Blog for American History, and The Rumpus. She also blogs for Black Perspectives and The Junto: A Group Blog on Early American History. She co-organizes the Queering Slavery Working Group (#QSWG) with Jessica Marie Johnson (Johns Hopkins University). Dr. Holden serves as a faculty adviser on a number of public history and digital humanities projects including: Freedom on the Move (a digital archive of runaway slave adds); Black Horsemen of the Kentucky. 

• Finalist, C. Wright Mills Book Award for No Way Out
• Two-time Winner of the Student Choice Teaching Award at the University of Pittsburgh
• Article of the Year Award, North Central Sociological Association for Fractured Reflections of High Status Black Male Presentations of Self: Non-Recognition of Identity as a Barrier to Exercising Legitimate Authority

Interdisciplinary projects (arts/social sciences/African American Studies); public history/digital history; queer/LGBTQ history and studies.