Sharon Raynor

Sharon D. Raynor is an Associate Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs and Professor of English at Elizabeth City State University. In her nearly thirty-year tenure in higher education, she held academic ranks and served in various administrative roles at East Carolina University, Johnson C. Smith University, Wake Forest University, the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, Pitt Community College, and Sampson Community College. Raynor has degrees in English and Multicultural Literature (BA ’94, MA ‘96) from East Carolina University and a PhD in Literature and Criticism (‘03) from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. She is the co-editor of Teaching Race in Perilous Times (SUNY Press 2021) Practicing Oral History with Military and War Veterans (Routledge Press 2022). She uses her various trans-media platforms to share veterans’ stories. Raynor is the Executive Producer for the documentary film, In the Face of Adversity: The Service and Legacy of African American WWII Veterans, for the North Carolina African American Veterans Lineage Day Documentary Project in collaboration with the NC Department of Military and Veterans Affairs, NC Museum of History, and NC Humanities. The website www.whenwritinggoestowar.com highlights the culmination of her veterans' oral history projects. She also collaborated with the NC Humanities on two grant -funded veterans oral history projects, with UNC-Chapel Hill School of Education with LEARNNC: North Carolina Digital History Textbook to design lesson plans, and with Cardinal and Pine to document “Hidden Valor: Remembering North Carolina’s Black Veterans on Memorial Day.” In 2020, she received the North Carolina Old North State Award for over twenty-years of service and dedication to education and veterans of North Carolina. She also has numerous publications in the areas in African American literature, veterans studies, and trauma studies. She has also held faculty fellowships at Duke University (Humanities Writ Large and the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity and Gender in the Social Sciences), New York University, W.E.B. DuBois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University, Gilder-Lehrman Institute of American History, the United States Air Force Academy, Yale University, Wake Forest University’s Humanities Institute, the Academic and Community Engagement (ACE) Fellowship Program, and their Center for Community Solutions and the Institute of Public Engagement She has participated in international faculty development study abroad programs with the UNCF/Mellon Faculty Seminar Program in Salvador, Brazil and Cape Town, South Africa, The Salzburg Seminar in Salzburg, Austria and the Council on International Educational Exchange in Dakar, Senegal and Cape Verde, West Africa.