Clayton Brooks, PhD

Clayton McClure Brooks holds a BA from Roanoke College where she majored in history. She then earned an MA and PhD in history from University of Virginia, where her primary field was in Twentieth Century South and secondary field in West Africa 1400-1800. She also earned her MEd from Mary Baldwin University specializing in Curriculum and Instruction. She loves history and teaching, and her dual position allows her to focus on both. Dr. Brooks has taught at Mary Baldwin University since fall 2012. She teaches a range of courses, online and on campus, in American history, social studies education, and senior seminars in both history and education.

After finishing her PhD, Dr. Brooks worked as a post-doctoral fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library in Staunton, Virginia. In this position, she conceptualized and edited a book for the National Governors Association entitled A Legacy of Leadership: Governors and
American History (2008). This was produced in celebration of the organization’s 100th Anniversary.

In 2017, the University of Virginia Press published Dr. Brooks’s book, The Uplift Generation: Cooperation Across the Color Line in the Early 20th Century Virginia, a study of race, gender, and Progressive Era focusing on the formative years of Jim Crow and how segregation was established in Virginia. This work explores the concept that segregation was not formed in the state by white political power structures alone, but rather through cooperation from a generation of Virginia reformers across the color line from 1900 to 1930.

She is a member of the American Historical Association, the Southern Historical Association, and serves on the editorial advisory board for the Virginia Magazine of History of Biography. Currently, she is working on a biography of the author and suffragist, Mary Johnston.

Dr. Brooks enjoys spending time with her family, a husband and three children.  She also loves reading and the theater, particularly when one of her children is in the production.