Address
Department of History
Texas Christian University
TCU Box 297260
Fort Worth, TX   76129
Telephone 817-257-5645
Fax 817-257-5650
E-mail R.Sharpless@tcu.edu

Education
Ph.D. (American Studies/Women’s Studies), Emory University, 1993
M.A. (American Studies), Baylor University, 1983
B.A. (English), Magna Cum Laude, Baylor University, 1978

Honors
Phi Beta Kappa
    Zeta of Texas chapter president, 1998-2000
Coral Horton Tullis Memorial Prize for best book on Texas history, Texas State Historical Association, 2000
Liz Carpenter Award for Research in the History of Women and Texas, Texas State Historical Association, 2000
T. R. Fehrenbach Book Award, Texas Historical Commission, 2000
Phi Alpha Theta (history)
Graduate Institute of Liberal Arts Fellowship, Emory University, 1987-88 and 1988-89
Andrew W. Mellon Dissertation Fellowship in Southern Studies, 1991

Present Position
Assistant Professor of History, Texas Christian University


Employment History
Director, Baylor University Institute for Oral History, 1993 -2006; Senior lecturer, Department of History, 2004 -2006
Interim Director, Program for Regional Studies, Baylor University, 1990-93
Instructor of History, part-time, Central Texas College, 1990
Instructor of History, part-time, Temple Junior College, 1990, 1993
Associate Director/Full-time Lecturer, Baylor University Institute for Oral History,
    1985-89 (on leave 1987-89); Assistant Director for Administration, 1982-85
Coordinator for Administrative Activities, Baylor University Program for Oral History,
    1979-82

Teaching
American History to 1865/1877
American History since 1865/1877
History of American Women
Introduction to Women’s Studies
Seminar in Oral History
The United States in the World
Direction of Honors Program thesis, Baylor University, 1999; service on thesis and dissertation committees for American Studies Program,
    Department of History, and School of Education, Baylor University; and Department of History, Texas A&M University

Professional Organizations
Agricultural History Society
American Historical Association
American Studies Association
Association for the Study of Food and Society
Oral History Association
    President, 2005-2006; Vice President, 2004-2005; First Vice President, 2003-2004
    Executive Secretary, 1994-98
    Executive Council, 1986-89
    Cochair, Program Committee, Annual Meeting, Salt Lake City, Utah, 1991; Chair, Ad-hoc Committee on Scholarships, 1994-95;
    Member, Program Committee, Annual Meeting, Birmingham, Alabama, 1993; Galveston, Texas, 1989; Lexington, Kentucky, 1984;
    Associate Editor, Oral History Association Newsletter (quarterly), 1979-87; Finance Committee, 1999 - ; Nominating Committee, 1999-2002
Organization of American Historians
    Editorial Board, OAH Newsletter, 1998-2001(chair, 2000)
Southern Association for Women Historians
    Council, 2006 -
Southern Historical Association
    Committee on Women in the SHA, 1994-97 (chair, 1996-97)
Texas Oral History Association
    Secretary-Treasurer, 1982-87
Texas State Historical Association
    Program Committee, 2004 Annual Meeting

Publications (Books Written)
Rock Beneath the Sand: Texas Country Churches (with Lois E. Myers and Clark Baker). Texas A&M University Press, 2003.
Fertile Ground, Narrow Choices: Women on Texas Cotton Farms, 1900-1940. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999.

Publications (Books Edited)
Coeditor (with Thomas L. Charlton and Lois E. Myers) Research Handbook of Oral History.  Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2006.
Coeditor (with Melissa Walker), Work, Family, and Faith: Rural Southern Women in the Twentieth Century. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006.
Coeditor (with Joe C. Yelderman, Jr.), The Texas Blackland Prairie: Land, History, and Culture. Waco, Tex.: Baylor University, 1993.
Coeditor (with Joseph A. McKinney), Implications of a North American Free Trade Region: Multidisciplinary Perspectives. Waco, Tex.: Baylor University, 1992;
    published in Canada by Carleton University Press.
Coeditor (with David Stricklin), The Past Meets the Present: Essays on Oral History. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1987.
Editor in chief, A Guide to the Collection, 1970-85: Baylor University Institute for Oral History. Waco, Tex.: Baylor University, 1985; co-compiler, Volume 2, 1985-1996 (1996).

Current Research
"Cooking in Other Women's Kitchens: African Americans in the South, 1865-1960"

Selected Publications (Articles)
(with Melissa Walker) “‘Pretty Near Every Woman Done a Man’s Work’: Women and Field Work in the Rural South.” In Work, Family, and Faith: Rural Women in the Twentieth-Century South, ed. Melissa Walker and Rebecca Sharpless. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2006.
“The History of Oral History.” In Handbook of Oral History, ed. Lois Myers, Rebecca Sharpless, and Thomas Charlton. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006.
“Women and Work during the Great Depression in Texas.”  In Invisible Texans: Women and Minorities in Texas, ed. Donald Willett and Stephen Curley. Dubuque, Iowa: McGraw-Hill, 2004. 
(with Lois E. Myers) "'Of the Least and the Most': The African American Rural Church." In African American Rural Life in the Twentieth Century, 1900-1950, ed. R. Douglas Hurt, 54-80.
    Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003.
"Hester Calvert, Texas Farm Wife." In The Human Tradition in Texas, ed. Ty Cashion and Frank de la Teja, 115-28. New York: Scholarly Resources, 2001.
"The Southern Majority: Interviews with Rural Texas Women." The Sound Historian 2 (Fall 1994), 2-11.
"Technology Behind a Mule: Breaking the Blacklands and the Cotton Empire," in The Texas Blackland Prairie: Land, History, and Culture, ed. Rebecca Sharpless and
    Joe C. Yelderman, Jr., 155-66. Waco, Tex.: Baylor University, 1993.
"Southern Women and the Land," Agricultural History 67 (Spring 1993): 30-42.
"The Numbers Game: Oral History Compared with Quantitative Methodology." The International Journal of Oral History 7, no. 2 (June 1986): 93-108.
"Oral History, The Texas Sesquicentennial, and Museums." Texas Association of Museums Quarterly 9 (Summer 1984): 15-16.
"Oral History and the Special Library." Catholic Library World 56 (Feb. 1984): 280-82.
"Celebrate Texas’s Birthday Through Oral History." The Older Texan 9 (Winter 1983-84): 5-6.
"Oral History in Texas: A Retrospection (Part I, 1967-75)." Texas Libraries 44 (April 1983): 58-62; Part II, 1975-83, Texas Libraries 44 (July 1983): 88-92.
"Efficiency in Oral History: Word Processing at Baylor University," Part I, The International Journal of Oral History 3 (June 1982): 133-35; Part II, The International Journal of Oral History 3 (Nov. 1982): 193-97. Coauthor.
Book reviews in Great Plains Quarterly, International Journal of Oral History, Journal of Library History, Journal of Southern History, Journal of the American Studies Association of Texas, Journal of Western History, Oral History Review, Public Historian, Rural Development Perspectives, Southern Changes, and Southwestern Historical Quarterly.

Selected Professional Activities and Presentations
Paper, "'Mirations' or Mockeries: Cooks, Employers, and Memory in the New South," Organization of American Historians, Boston, Massachusetts, April 2004
Paper, "'She Ought to Taken Those Cakes': Market Relationships of Urban and Rural Women, 1900-1940," Southern Association for Women Historians, Athens, Georgia, June 2003
Paper, "Remembering the Land: Southern American Sharecroppers," Twelfth International Oral History conference, Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, June 2002
Paper, "Oral History and Identity: The Reconstruction of Farm Women’s Life Histories in the Southern U.S.,"American Historical Association, Boston, Massachusetts, January 2001
Paper, "Living by the Book: Recipes as Texas Women’s Biography," Texas State Historical Association, Austin, Texas, March 2000
Paper, "The Open Country: People on the Texas Prairie," Oral History Association, Anchorage, Alaska, October 1999
Summer Institute in Oral History, Columbia University, completed June 1999
James Taylor Lecturer, Southwest Texas State University, San Marcos, Texas, March 1998
Panelist, "North American Institutional Oral History Projects," Ninth International Oral History conference, Göteborg, Sweden, June 1996 (travel funded by the American Council of Learned Societies)
Paper, "Town and Country: The Club Women’s Movement and the Roots of Home Demonstration in Texas, 1915-1930," The Berkshire Conference on Women’s History, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, June 1996
Paper, "The Lady and the Field Hand: Gender Ideals and Cotton Cultivation in the Twentieth-Century South," Organization of American Historians, Chicago, Illinois, March 1996
Paper, "Choices amid Constraints: Cultural Continuity on Early Twentieth-Century Central Texas Cotton Farms," Texas State Historical Association, Austin, Texas, March 1996
Review panelist, National Endowment for the Humanities Division of Preservation and Access, Washington, D.C., October 1995 and October 2000
Paper, "Voices from the Margins: New Perspectives on the New South," Southern Association for Women Historians conference, Houston, Texas, June 1994
Paper, "‘Little to Eat’: Women and the Effects of Single-Crop Farming on Rural Central Texas, 1900-1940," the Southern Historical Association, Orlando, Florida, November 1993
Paper, "The Southern Majority: Interviews with Rural Texas Women," Oral History Association Annual Meeting, Birmingham, Alabama, November 1993
Paper, "‘Only Through the Unremunerated Toil of Women and Children’: Gender and the Spread of Cotton Culture to 1940," Symposium on the Cotton Gin, Auburn, Alabama, May 1993
Paper, "Southern Women and the Land," Rural Women in Historical Perspective conference, Davis, California, June 1992
Paper, "Town Women, Farm Women: Home Demonstration and the Club Women’s Movement in Texas, 1914-30," Texas State Historical Association, Austin, Texas, February 1992
Facilitator, "Women’s Oral History: Theory and Practice," Women Historians in Texas Conference, San Antonio, Texas, May 1991
Paper, "Oral History, Texas Farm Women, and Changing Technology, 1900-1940," American Society of Environmental Historians Conference, Houston, Texas, March 1991
Paper, "Oral History and Radio Documentaries: Lincolnville at Moccasin Bend," Black History in Texas Conference, Dallas, Texas, February 1991
Paper, "Making Do: Women on the Cotton Farms of Central Texas, 1900-1940," Women & Texas History: A Conference, Austin, Texas, October 1990
Paper, "Technology Behind a Mule: Breaking of the Blacklands and the Cotton Empire," Symposium on The Texas Blacklands: Land, History, and Culture, Baylor University, Waco, Texas, April 1990
Panelist, "Experiences with Audio Documentaries," Oral History Association Annual Meeting, Baltimore, Maryland, October 1988

Selected Public Programming
Humanities advisor, "Crossover/Parallel Lives," oral history and public programming grant, Texas Council for the Humanities, 2000 -
Project director, "In the Land of Cotton: Documenting the Brazos Valley Before World War II," traveling photograph exhibit and lecture series, funded by the Texas Committee for the Humanities, 1993
Project codirector, "The Texas Grand Prairie: Land, History, Culture," symposium, Baylor University, April 1992
Director and producer, "Lincolnville at Moccasin Bend: Black Families on the Texas Frontier," a half-hour public radio production funded by the Texas Committee for the Humanities, 1986-87
Codirector and lecturer, Texas Sesquicentennial Oral History Workshops, fourteen public discussion meetings funded by the Texas Committee for the Humanities, cosponsored by the Texas Oral History Association, Texas Historical Commission, Texas 1986 Sesquicentennial Commission, and Texas State Library, 1983-85


Birth Waco, Texas; 14 October 1958

Personal Married to Thomas L. Charlton on 31 December 1988