Wanda Little Fenimore is an award-winning scholar and author whose area of expertise is rhetorical history: the study of historical events through a rhetorical lens. Her research focuses on the legacy of slavery in the US South and efforts to uphold and dismantle white supremacy. The Rhetorical Road to Brown v. Board of Education: Elizabeth and Waties Waring’s Campaign (University Press of Mississippi, 2023) examines the Warings’ multifaceted campaign to dismantle Jim Crow. The book weaves the Warings’ public address with local organizing, NAACP legal strategy, and national politics into a multilayered story of resistance. Nikki Haley’s Lessons from the New South (Lexington, forthcoming) follows the rhetorical breadcrumbs from Henry Grady’s nineteenth-century New South to Haley’s twenty-first century version by analyzing Haley’s speeches as South Carolina’s governor.

 

Dr. Fenimore received her bachelor’s degree from Randolph-Macon Woman’s College, master’s degree from Hollins University, and doctorate from Florida State University. Her research presented at state, national, and international conferences has been recognized with awards. Her work has been published in Rhetoric & Public Affairs, Carolinas Communication Annual, and the anthology Women in American History: A Social, Political, and Cultural Encyclopedia and Document Collection. In 2020, Dr. Fenimore received the Mellon/American Council of Learned Societies Community College Faculty Fellowship.

 

Dr. Fenimore has lived in South Carolina since 2015, but her connection to the Palmetto State reaches back to her childhood when she visited her grandparents every summer at their home outside of Charleston.