I have updated readers of my posts about my recent professional and writing activities every July since I began writing my blog during the summer of 2011. This post is my 2024 update.
Georgia Gwinnett College
The biggest change this year involves my employment. I am pleased to announce that I will become an assistant professor of legal studies at Georgia Gwinnett College (GGC) in Lawrenceville, Georgia, beginning on August 1, 2024. I was teaching at Kennesaw State University (KSU) before the GGC opportunity became available.
I enjoyed a long association with KSU. I taught there as a part-timer from August 1998 through May 2019. During the 2020-2021 academic year, I returned to KSU as a limited term assistant professor of public administration. Beginning in August 2021, I became a permanent, full-time lecturer of political science, a position that I held until July 2024.
I am leaving KSU with a heavy heart. I was 35 years old when I first taught there. I am 61 years old now. It was my institutional home for most of my academic career, and I enjoyed working with the students as well as my colleagues. Alas, life is about change, and it was time for a change.
The GGC position is a step up in my academic career. I will be an assistant professor as opposed to a lecturer. I will be working with the college’s paralegal certification program and teaching courses on legal topics such as constitutional law and civil litigation. I am excited about the challenges. As a bonus, I will have a much shorter commute—20.5 miles (GGC) versus 62.3 miles (KSU).
Writing Projects
Aside from my employment, I want to report on three writing projects in various stages of completion.
1. I am still laboring on a book about three nineteenth century Episcopal clergymen from South Carolina: Peter Fayssoux Stevens, A. Toomer Porter, and William Porcher DuBose. This was a project that my uncle, Loren B. Mead, began. He passed it off to me shortly before his death in 2018. For more details, see my 2023 update blog.
I am fortunate that I was able to publish two academic articles from the research:
On May 9, 2024, I signed a contract with my long-time publisher, Rowman & Littlefield, to publish a book about Stevens, Porter, and DuBose. The manuscript is due on May 1, 2025. Stay tuned for updates.
2. Routledge will publish my book Public Service Exemplars: A Finer Spirit of Hope and Achievement on August 2, 2024. I will provide more details about the book in a future post.
3. Finally, I have developed a book proposal about famous, or infamous, demagogues in American history. As I will discuss in the book, a “demagogue” can be defined as a political leader who appeals to the desires and prejudices of ordinary people using emotion and myth in lieu of constructing a rational, policy-driven argument. A demagogue is not necessarily a populist, or “a man of the people,” but he often is, targeting his appeal to the forgotten men and women who typically are uneducated, poor, and rural. In his zeal to manipulate public opinion on his behalf, a demagogue frequently lies, even when the lies do not directly benefit his cause. Sometimes a demagogue creates an alternate reality, spinning so many webs of deceit that neither he nor anyone else quite remembers the truth.
Here is my current list of demagogues that will be covered in the book.
Chapter 1: Andrew Jackson
Chapter 2: Lewis Charles Levin
Chapter 3: Tom Watson
Chapter 4: Pa and Ma Ferguson
Chapter 5: William Hale “Big Bill” Thompson Chapter 6: Theodore Bilbo
Chapter 7: Marcus Garvey
Chapter 8: Huey P. Long
Chapter 9: Father Charles Coughlin
Chapter 10: Eugene Talmadge
Chapter 11: James Michael Curley
Chapter 12: Gerald L. K. Smith
Chapter 13: Joseph R. McCarthy
Chapter 14: George Wallace
Chapter 15: Donald Trump
I have just completed the book proposal. I will begin searching for a publisher in coming months. Stay tuned. I will report on my progress in my 2025 update.
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