We recently connected with Melissa Blair and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Melissa thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to hear about the things you feel your parents did right and how those things have impacted your career and life.

My parents were supportive of my dreams and never really tried to discourage me from becoming a historian. They allowed my brother & me to follow our interests, even when those interests were in writing, academia, and the humanities. What’s remarkable about that is that it’s so different from their own choices: my mom is a nurse, and my dad never went to college. He drove trains for CSX for 35 years.

Melissa, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I am a history professor at Auburn University in Auburn, Alabama, where I specialize in U.S. women’s history. I have been incredibly lucky to get to work in this field – the odds of getting tenured jobs in history aren’t great these days. With my current book I have moved consciously into writing for a wider audience, trying to get historical knowledge about women in our past out of the ivory tower and into popular conversations. Making that shift from academic writing to writing for a more general audience is challenging, but really exciting. I’ve been lucky to have a really supportive agent who has encouraged me every step of the way. My favorite thing about my job is getting to tell stories about women who have been forgotten or overlooked, and connecting them to the big historical picture. That’s really what ties the two sides of my career – the teaching and the writing – together. Whether it’s in my classes or in my books, I want everyone to come away from an interaction with me knowing that there have been hundreds of thousands of remarkable women who have made our country what it is, and whose names we almost never hear.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

For me, thinking about myself as a creative, a writer, is so exciting because it enables me to reach a bigger audience than would ever be possible if I only was a teacher. Teaching is profoundly important to me, and I know I have an impact on my students. But if you never enrolled at Auburn or took one of my classes, I wouldn’t have any way to share what I know with you if I wasn’t also a writer. Being a historian enables me to go into the archives and find all these cool stories that have been forgotten or overlooked. Taking that research out into the world through my writing is incredibly fulfilling.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

So many pivots! But the one I’ll write about is the story of how this book came to be. My original research question was to look at how presidential campaigns pitched to female voters for pretty much the entire 20th century. It was a huge question, and so I started at the chronological beginning. As I worked in the archives at the FDR, Truman, and Eisenhower presidential libraries I found these amazing women. I didn’t go looking for them. I had never heard of them. But they jumped out of the archives at me and I knew they needed to be the center of the book. Having my agent, Lauren, approach me shortly afterwards and ask if I had thought about writing a more biographical book enabled me to really feel comfortable going the direction I wanted. But this is not at all the book I proposed when I was writing my first research travel grant applications five years ago. That’s the nature of historical research – you go into the archives with a question and a hunch, and then you just dive into what the archives give you.

Contact Info:

• Website: melissablairhistorian.com
• Instagram: @melissablairhistorian

Image Credits
Head shots and hands on the book: Eloise Design Book cover images: University of Georgia Press