Charles Ford

Charles FordCharles H. Ford, PhD, is a professor of history at Norfolk State University (NSU). He also serves as the director of the Quality Enhancement Plan (QEP) at NSU and as chair of its history department. In the 1990s, his primary research areas were in 18th-century Britain and the Atlantic world, and he published Hannah More: A Critical Biography in 1996. In this century, Ford has pursued and published—along with his colleagues, Cassandra Newby-Alexander of NSU and Jeffrey Littlejohn, once of NSU and now at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas—a number of projects explicitly dealing with the desegregation of public schools in Norfolk, Virginia. Ford and Littlejohn’s Elusive Equality: Desegregation and Resegregation in Norfolk’s Public Schools is under contract and in production at the University of Virginia Press. Given his multiple roles as historian, teacher, and administrator, Ford is keenly interested in recruiting more history majors and in making history curricula more effective with reference to student learning. By way of participation in the AHA’s Tuning Project, he hopes to achieve those two aforementioned goals.