William A. Link

Fall 2025 Cornerstone Visiting Professor, University of Richmond

2004-2022 Richard J. Milbauer Chair in Southern History, University of Florida

2018-19 President of the Southern Historical Association

University of Florida

William A. Link has written extensively about the history of the South, including Paradox of Southern Progressivism (1992), Roots of Secession (2003), Jesse Helms and the Rise of Modern Conservatism (2008), Atlanta, Cradle of the New South (2013), and a two-volume history of the South, Southern Crucible (2015). More recently, he published Frank Porter Graham: Southern Liberal, Citizen of the World (2022) and The Last Fire-Eater: Roger A. Pryor and the Search for a Southern Identity (2022).

Forthcoming in April 2026 with UNC Press is Jesse Helms: Modern Conservatism and the Politics of Opposition – preorder

Jesse Helms (1921–2008) dominated the political landscape of North Carolina during the last half of the twentieth century.  Though Helms’s thirty years in the US Senate are most remembered for what he opposed rather than what he achieved, he was a central figure in modern conservativism.

For twenty-three years, Link was a professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, teaching courses in North Carolina history, the history of the American South, and twentieth-century American history.

In 2004, he became the Richard J. Milbauer chair in southern history at the University of Florida, replacing longtime chairholder Bertram Wyatt-Brown.  Link retired in 2022, and David Silkenat became Milbauer Chair in fall 2024.

During Fall 2025, Link became the Cornerstone Visiting Professor at the University of Richmond, where he taught a course on the Watergate crisis and its comparisons with Donald Trump and the Make America Great Again political culture of the 2020s.