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History at Mary Baldwin College

History Faculty

Dr. Ann Alexander

Dr. Mary Hill Cole Dr. Mary Hill Cole

Dr. Mary Hill Cole is professor of history and current chair of the history department. She received her PhD in English history at the University of Virginia. She teaches undergraduate courses in English history, modern European history, and women’s history. In the graduate MLitt/MFA Shakespeare in Performance program, she teaches courses in Tudor-Stuart political, religious, and social history. Her book, The Portable Queen: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Ceremony, was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in 1999. She has published articles on Elizabethan progresses in Douglas F. Rutledge, ed., "Ceremony and Text in the Renaissance" (University of Delaware Press,1996); Carole Levin, Jo Eldridge Carney and Debra Barrett-Graves, eds., "Elizabeth I: Always Her Own Free Woman" (Ashgate, 2003); and Jayne Elisabeth Archer, Elizabeth Goldring, and Sarah Knight, eds., "The Progresses, Pageants, and Entertainments of Queen Elizabeth I" (Oxford University Press, 2007). Her article, “Maternal Memory: Elizabeth Tudor’s Anne Boleyn” will appear in an anthology, "Elizabeth I and the ‘Sovereign Arts’: Essays in Literature, History, and Culture", forthcoming in 2009. She also is the Mary Baldwin director of the Virginia Program at Oxford and the advisor to Phi Alpha Theta, the history honor society.

Dr. Katharine M.G. FranzenDr. Katharine M.G. Franzen

Dr. Franzen is a part-time assistant professor of history, teaching European history courses on campus and in the Adult Degree Program. She also teaches Inquiry in the Social Sciences in the Master of Arts in Teaching Program at Mary Baldwin College. Her special interest is in modern British history, and her dissertation was on government assisted emigration from rural England during the nineteenth century. Dr. Franzen first came to the United States as the St. Andrews Exchange Scholar to the College of William and Mary. Her most recent interest is in oral history, particularly of World War II veterans and civilians. She has edited a series of memoirs by a U.S. combat veteran of World War II.

Dr. Franzen is passionate about classroom teaching and about opening her students' eyes to the difference between knowing what happened and understanding why. She also seeks to find parallels in history, both recent and in the more distant past, which help us to recognize events and outcomes, with similarities and differences. Where possible and relevant, she tries to make history immediate to our everyday lives and decisions, and enjoys bringing outside speakers into the classroom.

Ken KellerDr. Kenneth Keller

Kenneth Keller is a professor of history at Mary Baldwin College and is a scholar of the early American republic and German and Scots-Irish immigration to early America. Dr. Keller is a member of the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, Phi Alpha Theta, Omicron Delta Kappa, and Phi Beta Kappa. His monograph Rural Politics and the Collapse of Pennsylvania Federalism was published by the American Philosophical Society. He has been published in The Encyclopedia of Southern History, Dictionary of Virginia Biography, and the New Encyclopedia of the American West. His essay "What is Distinctive about the Scots-Irish?" appeared in Robert Mitchell's volume Appalachian Frontiers.Dr. Keller published an essay on the Germans called “The Outlook of Rhinelanders on the Virginia Frontier” in Michael Puglisi’s volume Diversity and Accommodation--Essays on the Cultural Composition of the Virginia Frontier. In 2003 he successfully prepared a proposal for a large grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s Teaching American History program to establish the Institute for Decisive Events in American History at Mary Baldwin College, which benefits public school teachers in the region. Dr. Keller's most recent work involves a study of the Valley Turnpike, an examination of the wheat trade on the Upper Potomac, and other publications on the Scots-Irish in Virginia and medicine in the Shenandoah Valley.

Rick PotterDr. Rick Potter

Edmund (Rick) Potter is an adjunct professor history for Mary Baldwin College. He teaches both for the Residential College and the Adult Degree Program. Dr. Potter’s areas of scholarly interest include the history of technology, architectural history, modern Europe, and America post 1865. His dissertation examined the role of World War I in shaping the social use of architecture in inter-war Birmingham, England. He is a member of the American Historical Association, the Society of the History of Technology, the Society of Architectural Historians, and Phi Alpha Theta. Dr. Potter began his career in preservation in 1983 with the restoration of the Lobby of the Joseph Nichols Tavern, built in 1815. Since then, he has worked for the Lynchburg Museum System, Thomas Jefferson's Poplar Forest, the National Park Service, and served for seven years as the Curator of Collections at the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library. He has organized and participated in numerous restoration projects and co-written two National Register nominations.

Amy TilllersonDr. Amy Tillerson

Amy Tillerson is a native of Prince Edward County. For her dissertation, Tillerson is researching the activism of Black women in Prince Edward County, Virginia between 1930 and 1965. Prince Edward County is most well known for the school crisis that closed public schools for five years. Before accepting her position as history instructor and director of the Institute for Decisive Events in American History at Mary Baldwin College, Amy was director of African American Heritage Program at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities at UVA. She has taught in the history departments at University of Virginia, Virginia Tech, Morgan State, and Piedmont Virginia Community College. She has also been a public school teacher and counselor in Roanoke City Public Schools and Baltimore City Public Schools.