Meet Our Team

Ellen Holmes Pearson, PhD

Ellen Holmes Pearson is Roy Carroll Professor of Arts & Sciences, Professor of History, and Interim Vice Provost at the University of North Carolina Asheville. She holds a Ph.D. in early American history from The Johns Hopkins University and is the author of Remaking Custom: Law and Identity in the Early American Republic, published by the University of Virginia Press. She is also a scholar/teacher of the Digital Liberal Arts, serving as co-Principal Investigator (with Dr. Jeffrey McClurken) on “Digital Liberal Arts at a Distance,” a Council of Public Liberal Arts Colleges (COPLAC) initiative supported by a grant from the Mellon Foundation (2016-2020). She recently completed a three-year term as Faculty Fellow on the UNC System’s Digital Learning Initiative, and she currently serves as Director of an NEH Humanities Connections grant that will infuse digital humanities practices across the UNC Asheville curriculum. Recent publications on the digital liberal arts and humanities include “Neither Here nor There: Testing the Boundaries of Place and Pedagogy,” in Roads Taken: The Professorial Life, Scholarship in Place, and the Public Good, and several essays and articles on the digital liberal arts and distance learning. As part of  “The 828 Digital Archives for Historical Equity,” Dr. Holmes Pearson is collaborating with students, history colleagues, and community partners to study the history of African American cemeteries and churches in Western North Carolina. She and her students are conducting research on the individuals buried in these cemeteries in order to create interactive story maps about their lives and contributions to this area. 

css.php