Dr La Shonda Mims MA, PhD

• PhD in History, University of Georgia, United States
• MA in History, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, United States
• BA in History, Georgia State University, United States

I joined the University of Birmingham in the fall of 2023. Before relocating to the UK, I was a tenured Associate Professor at Middle Tennessee State University, near Nashville. I have held lecturer positions at several universities in the United States, including Towson University in Maryland, University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and Kennesaw State University in Georgia. I have spent most of my life, and earned all my degrees, in the southern states of the U.S. Prior to entering graduate school, I worked as a public historian in several museums, including the Harriet Beecher Stowe House in Connecticut and the Charlotte, North Carolina, Museum of History.

As a professional historian I serve on the executive leadership board of the Southern Association for Women in History, the advisory board for OutHistory, and the editorial advisory board for the Politics and Culture in the Twentieth-Century South series of the University of Georgia Press.

Second Year

•  History in Theory and Practice
• Group Research: “Southern Belles and Redneck Women: Gender and Race in the US South

Third Year

• Advanced Option: "Black Activisms in the US South: Power, Feminisms, and Black Lives Mattering from 1960-present "
• Dissertation Supervision 

Masters

• Distance Learning, Research Methods (convenor)

I am interested in supervising topics in 20th c US history, with a particular focus on histories of white privilege, racism, women’s history, urban history and queer sexualities.

Current PhD supervisions:
Lesbian Cultures in UK Urban Spaces
Women and Marginalized Peoples in Community Archives

Find out more - our PhD History  page has information about doctoral research at the University of Birmingham.

My first book, Drastic Dykes and Accidental Activists, published by the University of North Carolina Press, examines queer life in the U.S. South. By uniting southern women's history with urban history my book explores an imaginatively constructed archive including feminist newsletters and queer bar guides alongside sources revealing corporate boosterism and political rhetoric to uncover the complex nature of lesbian life in the South.

My second major research project, “‘Far from the Peaceful Shore,’” interrogates the transnational history of the Pentecostal Assemblies of God denomination, with a particular focus on race, women, and queer identity. This interdisciplinary and integrative research will open new doors in the scholarly examination of the daily life of evangelicalpreachers, missionaries, and believers, who are often ignored in the literature. This oversight is pronounced when considering the lives of women in the church, their ideas about sexualities, and their occasional willingness to cross the traditional southern borders of racial division. Conservative teachings of the Assemblies of God fuel the problematic perception that all queer people leave the church, remain closeted, and never feel a sense of belonging there. My research works to untangle this myth and tell the stories of the many queer people who grew up in Pentecostalism and continue to find ways to build relationships within evangelicalism. Uniting broad-based studies of evangelicalism with queer and women’s studies, I will connect this research to the large group of believers throughout the Global South.

I am committed to sharing my work with popular audiences. You can find my writing in the editorial pages of The Washington Post, and on several podcasts, including The Road to Now.