Hi, my name is T. DeWayne Moore. 

I am an Assistant Professor of History in the Division of Social Sciences at Prairie View A&M University (PVAMU) in Texas, and I administer several grant-funded digital humanities, archival processing, digitization, oral history, and historical archaeology projects for the National Endowment for the Humanities, Humanities Texas, Getty Images, and the Summerlee Foundation. Please navigate to the grants section to read all of the grant proposals currently in-process.

I previously worked as an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of History at Bowling Green State University, where I served on the Graduate and Public History Committees as well as served as Digital Media Editor. I earned my Ph.D. from the Center for the Study of Southern Culture and the Department of History at the University of Mississippi, and I hold an M.A. from the Public History Program in the History Department at Middle Tennessee State University. I have lectured and led seminars about Early and Modern American History, The Civil War & Reconstruction, Special Topics in African American History, Critical Thinking, and Historical Society Administration.

I also serve as Field Secretary of the Mt. Zion Memorial Fund, a historical consulting firm promoting reparative justice and responsible practices regarding the memorialization of African Americans and the maintenance of abandoned cemeteries. After I conducted research that ended a legal dispute over cemetery access—between landowners and the African Americans descendants of the interments in a cemetery located on private land, I collaborated with other descendants of blues artists to research, design, and install memorials that transformed several endangered cemeteries into international tourist destinations. Our work builds on the growing interest in inclusive memorialization processes by emphasizing the role memorials play in the process of racial reconciliation. From the framework that regards memorials as instruments of reparations that keep the past visible, we encourage people to see monuments as symbolic reparative tools that facilitate historic preservation.

In October 2021, the University Press of Mississippi publish several of my essays (33,000 words) in Mississippi Fiddle Tunes, Commercial and Informal Recordings, 1920-2018. In addition to mining digital archives and compiling primary source documents from county courthouses across the state to compose fresh and richly contextualized biographies about African American fiddlers and their families from slavery to the early recording era, I provided unseen documents and photographs for the essays of one of my co-authors, country music discographer Tony Russell, and I collaborated during the extensive field research process of the editor, Harry Bolick. 

I also began exposing the myth of southern redemption through a love of Black music in “Revisiting Ralph Lembo: Complicating Charley Patton, the 1920s Race Record Industry, and the Italian American Experience in the Mississippi Delta,” an article published in the December 2018 volume of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections Journal. By demonstrating the powerful research potential of digital archives and re-examining oral histories from the 1960s, I not only restored the good name of an Italian immigrant and talent scout for southern musicians in 1920s Mississippi, but I also began a very rewarding collaboration with a group of ethnomusicologists, professional archivists, and the descendants of southern musicians.

My current book project, tentatively titled “Forgotten in the Place it was Born and Raised”: A History of Mississippi Action for Community Education and the Origins of Blues Tourism in the Politics, Performances,  and Bicentennial Protests in the Queen City, examines the distortions of African American history and culture in the tourism narratives of the 1970s Mississippi Delta, how those narratives have affected policy decisions on the state level, and the ways that African Americans and others have attempted to resist and revise the popular narrative about the blues to educate and heighten the consciousness of African Americans.  My research also complicates the narrative framing of the movement and examines the practice of public history as a means to continue the black freedom struggle in the 1970s. By examining the ways that community activists in Mississippi Action for Community Education helped people on the lowest rungs of the social, political, and economic ladder, my research demonstrates how they picked up the mantle of the Mississippi movement and wrestled away from large corporations, private foundations, and federal agencies the tools required to combat poverty, empower communities, build wealth, and secure a share of the “American Dream.”  Though I am currently revising the manuscript for publication, the Southern Cultures journal, published by UNC Press for the Center for the Study of the American South, published one chapter, “Worth Westinghouse Long Jr.: Creating Dangerously in The Land Where the Blues Began,” in its special “Documentary Moment” edition in the Spring 2020.