Jamin Wells

Jamin Wells is an Associate Professor of History and Director of the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program. He earned his Ph.D. in history from the University of Delaware through the Hagley Program in the History of Capitalism, Technology, and Culture. Before joining UF in 2025, he directed the Public History Graduate Program and served as associate dean of the College of Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities at the University of West Florida.

Wells’s research explores how communities understand and shape place, with particular interests in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American cultural and environmental history, Florida history, and the history of the American coast. His first book, Shipwrecked: Coastal Disasters and the Making of the American Beach (University of North Carolina Press, 2020), received the John Lyman Book Award in U.S. Maritime History. His current book project, Pensacola: The Two-Century Battle for the Past in America’s First Settlement, examines how struggles over public memory have shaped a Southern community across two centuries.

Committed to collaborative and community-engaged scholarship, Wells has led grant-funded oral history, digital history, and public history initiatives throughout the Gulf South. These include the 309 Punk House Oral History Project, which contributed to the publication of A Punkhouse in the Deep South: The Oral History of the 309 (University Press of Florida, 2021), and Righting the Past, an award-winning public history project being developed into a co-edited volume forthcoming from UNC Press in 2027. His interdisciplinary publications bring historical perspectives and methods to cemetery studies, policing research, and cumulative impact assessments.

Wells serves on the editorial boards of the Florida Historical Quarterly and Gulf South Historical Review and served as chair of the Florida State Historical Marker Council. He also serves on the Gulf Scholars Program Advisory Committee in UF’s Bob Graham Center for Public Service.

At UF, Wells teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in oral history and public history and mentors students interested in oral history, public memory, Florida and Gulf South history, environmental history, and community-engaged research. Through SPOHP, students can gain hands-on experience in interviewing, fieldwork, archival practice, digital history, and collaborative historical research and interpretation.