James V. Carmichael

• Professor
• Library and Information Studies, UNCG
• Jim_Carmichael@uncg.edu
• (336) 334-3478
• 349 Curry Building
• http://www.lisuncg.net/faculty_websites/carmichael/index.html

James V Carmichael, Jr. (Jim) is a Professor of Library and Information Studies at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where he has taught on the tenure-track since 1989. He was born in Marietta, Georgia on November 27, 1946. He was educated in a grade-school military school, a New England prep school, with a year at College Cévenol in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon in France for “emotional maturity” in 1963-64, and received his A. B. (French, 1969) and MLn. (1977) degrees from Emory University. He received his Ph. D. from UNC-Chapel Hill in 1988. The subject of his dissertation was “Tommie Dora Barker and Southern Librarianship,” and concerned Barker’s role in reconciling sectional feeling with national professional goals in the difficult years of The Great Depression. Carmichael has written widely on the history of southern libraries, and in particular the role of different library education programs in influencing the spread of professional librarianship throughout the southern region. A secondary interest, derived from a male librarian survey on which he was advised by an older scholar not to ask the sexual orientation of survey respondents, is gay library history—not so much the history of particular figures and events as the context through which gay liberation, gay literature, and professional gay identity emerged in the 1950s and 1960s. Carmichael himself has been publicly out since 1978, although his sexual orientation was suspect to most people who knew him prior to that date. He maintains, however, that gay history is secondary in intellectual importance to the history of gender in that the assignment of social --and professional--roles is usually based on the way that male and female roles are socially defined, whatever other verbal or surgical enhancements we may add to the mix.