Josh Hollands
Visiting Fulbright Scholar in History and Geography
Department: History and Geography
Email: jhollands@elon.edu
Brief Biography
Josh is a Visiting Fulbright Scholar from University College London where he is a Lecturer (Teaching) in United States History. He is a historian of the modern United States with particular focus on sexuality, political economy, and social movements. He joined UCL Institute of the Americas first as an MA student in US Studies, and later as a PhD student where his research was supported by a Wolfson Foundation Scholarship in the Humanities. He received his BA in American Studies from the University of Hull in 2014. During his BA Josh spent a year abroad at San Francisco State University. He also serves as a study abroad tutor for UCL Institute of the Americas. As such he is keen to encourage students to study abroad and become internationally engaged.
Josh teaches broadly in modern US history and more specifically on histories of the US South, sexuality, and the 1970s.
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News & Notes
Current Projects
Josh’s research interests lie at the intersection of sexuality, class, gender and race in the post-1945 United States. His recently completed PhD thesis examines histories of homophobic workplace discrimination in the US South and Southwest, and the movements that emerged to counter it.
He is currently developing this thesis for publication by the University of Illinois Press. Provisionally entitled: Work and Sexuality in the Sunbelt: Homophobic Workplace Discrimination in the US South and Southwest, 1970 to the present, this project examines episodes of discrimination in different Sunbelt cities and companies. Chapters focused on individual organisations such as Apple Computer, Cracker Barrel, Duke University and ExxonMobil shed light on mainstream LGBT strategies for equality within corporations, as well as the extent to which victories at these companies impacted wider rights for sexual minorities in southern cities. Similarly, case studies on organisations of business elites in Sunbelt cities including Houston and Williamson County, Texas, demonstrate how battles over workplace rights in both the private and public sectors informed conservative rhetoric in opposition to, and in some cases, acceptance of LGBT rights during the closing decades of the twentieth-century.
He is also developing a second project that is a business history of the Cracker Barrel Old Country Stores chain, and the company's use of southern US history.
Grants Awarded
Fulbright-Elon University Award, 2021-22, US-UK Fulbright Commission.
Wolfson Foundation Scholarship in Humanities, 2015-2018, funded PhD with research grant.
Historians of the Twentieth Century United States (HOTCUS) ‘10 for 10’ Travel Award. 2019.
Organization of American Historians (OAH) Presidents' Travel Fund for Emerging Historians Grant. 2019.
Publications
Book Monograph in Progress:
Work and Sexuality in the Sunbelt: Homophobic Workplace Discrimination in the US South and Southwest, 1970 to the present. Under Contract: University of Illinois Press.
Article:
Joshua Hollands, “Work and Sexuality in the Sunbelt: Homophobic Workplace Discrimination in the U.S. South and Southwest, 1970 to the Present.” Enterprise & Society 22, no. 4 (2021): 939–49. doi:10.1017/eso.2021.50.
Chapter:
“Animating America’s Anticommunism: Alice's Egg Plant and Disney's First Red Scare” in Discussing Disney, Amy M. Davis ed. (John Libbey & Co./University of Indiana Press, 2019).
Awards
Josh was awarded the Labor and Working Class History Association's (LAWCHA) 2020 Herbert G. Gutman Prize for Outstanding Dissertation.
In 2017, Josh was awarded the Robert H. Zieger Prize for Southern Labor Studies for research on discrimination at the Cracker Barrel restaurant chain.