HIGH POINT, N.C., Nov. 30, 2015 – Joey Ann Fink recently joined the faculty of High Point University as an instructor of history. She teaches undergraduate survey courses in 20th century U.S. history and western civilization.
Fink’s teaching and research focus on connecting history to contemporary communities and current issues by examining oral history. This includes studying the history of women, gender and the working class as well as the global movement of labor and capital.
“Doing history is a mix of detective work, story-telling, forensics and reconstruction,” says Fink. “I want my students to gain a working knowledge of the major events and changes in the modern world, and also understand how historians find, use and present evidence to craft historical narratives.”
Fink also supports the Southern Oral History Program, an effort to conduct oral histories on the civil rights, women’s and labor movements in the South. Through this program, she has led several workshops for students and community members on how to conduct oral history interviews and preserve and present local and regional stories of ordinary people who have done and witnessed extraordinary things.
She previously has led several oral history workshops for the William Penn Project at HPU.
“A worker in the North Carolina cotton mills in the 1920s once said, ‘You don’t have to be famous for your life to be history.’ Borrowing from that, I want my students to know they don’t have to be historians to enjoy studying history,” says Fink. “I think there is a place for all talents and interests in my classroom.”
Fink has a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Massachusetts Boston. She has a master’s degree in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and will graduate with a doctorate in history this December.