Department of History

Welcome Dr. William Link

Dr. Link joins the History Department in Fall 2025 as the Visiting Cornerstones Chair. He is a scholar of the social and political history of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. South. He has authored eleven books, most recently The Last Fire-Eater: Roger A. Pryor and the Search for a Southern Identity (2022) and Frank Porter Graham: Southern Liberal, Citizen of the World (2021). His newest book, Jesse Helms: Modern Conservatism and the Politics of Opposition, will be published by UNC Press in 2026.

Dr. Link was a member of the history faculty at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro from 1981 to 2004. While at UNC-G and UF, he taught two current University of Richmond history professors—Dr. Holloway and Dr. Broomall. In 2004, he was named the Richard J. Milbauer Chair in Southern History at the University of Florida, where he taught until his retirement in 2022.

This fall at the University of Richmond, Dr. Link will teach a course on the Watergate crisis, the series of events that began in 1972 with the burglary of the Democratic National Committee offices in Washington, D.C., and culminated in President Richard Nixon’s resignation. In addition to studying the events of this period and Nixon’s political career, students will examine broader questions about presidential authority and Congress’s constitutional role in responding to misconduct in the Oval Office. Throughout the semester, students will engage with the extensive primary sources available from this pivotal period in American history.