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Associate Professor Ben Wise (Ph.D. Rice University, 2008) is a historian of modern America, and specializes in southern history, gender and sexuality, and cultural history. He joined the History Department at the University of Florida as an Assistant Professor after teaching at Harvard University and holding a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
His first book, William Alexander Percy: The Curious Life of a Mississippi Planter and Sexual Freethinker, was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2012. In 2009 he was awarded the C. Vann Woodward Prize for the best dissertation in the field of southern history. His research has been supported by grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Center for the Study of the American South at the University of North Carolina, and the Regional Humanities Center at Tulane University. His articles have appeared in The Journal of American Studies, Southern Cultures, The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, The William Mitchell Law Review, and in the edited volume, Southern Masculinity: Perspectives on Manhood in the South Since Reconstruction (2008).
Dr. Wise teaches courses on gender and sexuality, modern America, southern history, the Jazz Age, and American culture. In 2010, he was named a teacher of the year in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and in 2013 he was awarded the history department's John Mahon Undergraduate Teaching Award.