Matt O’Neal
Assistant Professor of History and Southern Studies
Matt O’Neal is a historian of race, labor, and migration in the Appalachian South. He earned a PhD from the University of Georgia in 2023, where he completed his dissertation, “Home and Hell: The Great Migration and the Making of Sundown Towns in Appalachia.” He is the author of two forthcoming articles, in the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era and the Register of the Kentucky Historical Society. Matt has also been featured in a documentary produced by Black in Appalachia as well as public conversations on the local legacies of racial violence. In 2022, he received the Robert H. Zieger Prize from the Southern Labor Studies Association. He teaches classes in the Department of History as well as the Center for the Study of Southern Culture.