2025 Faculty and Staff
Charles McKinney
Director, Rhodes Institute for Regional Studies
Associate Professor of History
Office: Buckman Hall 213
Phone: (901) 843-3525
mckinneyc@rhodes.edu
Charles McKinney, Associate Professor of History and Director of the Rhodes Institute for Regional Studies, is a specialist in African American history and twentieth century U.S. social history, particularly the history of the Civil Rights Movement. He is the author of Greater Freedom: The Evolution of the Civil Rights Struggle in Wilson, North Carolina, which chronicles a movement from the 1930s to the 1970’s. He is the co-editor of An Unseen Light: Black Struggles for Freedom in Memphis, Tennessee, and From Rights To Lives: The Evolution of the Black Freedom Struggle. His current research focuses on the impact of local leadership on civil rights activity in Memphis, and his regional interests include the history of segregation, civil rights, and social justice movements in Memphis. Previous Institute projects he has mentored have included historical research on Civil Rights activity in Memphis and surrounding communities; research on African American political activity in Memphis; the digital divide in Memphis; and gender dynamics within the Civil Rights movement.
Laura Taylor
Associate Professor of Educational Studies and Urban Studies
taylorl@rhodes.edu
(901) 843-3986
Laura Taylor is a qualitative researcher whose work seeks to explore how we can build urban schools that are both humanizing and intellectually challenging spaces for students. This work necessarily takes an interdisciplinary approach, including examinations of the political, economic, cultural, and historical reasons why schools are not always already providing these experiences for students. Her research draws on methodological tools like ethnography, discourse analysis, and critical media analysis, and she often uses focus groups and interviews to learn the expertise of teachers, students, and parents. Her current projects include analyzing the public debate over test-based retention of Tennessee third-graders and understanding how educators are sustaining antiracist teaching in the current political climate.
Hadi Khoshneviss
Assistant Professor of Sociology
khoshnevissh@rhodes.edu
Hadi Khoshneviss, Assistant Professor of Sociology, is a specialist in social theory, social movements, nationalism, and movement and mobility. He has published pieces in Mobilities, Postcolonial Studies, Critical Sociology, and Ethnicities. His research is primacy concerned with the historical construction of socio-political and legal categories and how individuals and groups transition through these representational and discursive borders and boundaries. He has also studied the historical construction of whiteness in the United States. His current research project with Dr. Evelyn Perry investigates homelessness, belonging, and transition between major stages of life among residents of a shelter in the South. He is also starting a research project about bugs and humans.
Charity Clay
Visiting Assistant Professor of History
clayc@rhodes.edu
Charity Clay is a visiting professor of African American History. She comes to Rhodes College after being a 2023-24 research fellow at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University. Before that she was a professor of Sociology at Xavier University of Louisiana. Dr. Clay is an integrated methods sociologist of the African Diaspora who has taught courses in Sociology, Women's and Gender Studies and African American and Diaspora Studies. Her work centers around place-based understandings of Black liberation and resistance movements. These movements date back to the 1600s with Marronage from enslavement in the New World; include decolonization movements on the African continent during the 1900s, and provide frameworks for understanding the Social Media era of Black Freedom struggle in the United States. For the summer of 2025, Dr. Clay’s area of focus will be the South Memphis Stories Project, an oral history initiative funded by the Mellon Foundation.
Robert Saxe
Associate Professor of History
saxer@rhodes.edu
Robert Saxe has taught U.S. history at 51ÁÔÆæ College since 2003.  His Ph.D. is from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Settling Down: World War II Veterans’ Challenge to the Postwar Consensus (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2007) and co-editor with Jeff Jackson of The Underground Reader: Sources in Trans-Atlantic Counterculture (Berghahn Books, 2015). More recently, he completed Daily Life for Americans during World War II for the Daily Life through History Series (ABC-CLIO), which will be released in September 2026. He has participated in RIRS for seven summers, the last being in 2017, and looks forward to rejoining the program.
Jacob Sunshine
Assistant Professor of Music
sunshinej@rhodes.edu
Jacob Sunshine is an ethnomusicologist, electric guitarist, producer/sound artist, and Assistant Professor of Music at 51ÁÔÆæ College. A scholar of sound cultures in the Caribbean, Africa, and the United States, his work incorporates methods of ethnography, oral history, archival research, and musical analysis. His current book project, Déjala Correr: The Sonic Infrastructure of Sociality on Colombia’s Caribbean Coast focuses on sound system and DJ culture in Barranquilla, Colombia, the West and Central African guitar music these sound systems play and its role in constructing a Afro-diasporic imaginary, and racialized conflicts over sound in public space in these urban environments. Along with his musical research, his research interests include technopolitics and infrastructure in urban environments, the role of race and ethnicity in political movements, and vernacular forms of global circulation. On the guitar, he has collaborated with a wide variety of Memphis and New York-based groups and is currently working on an album of original instrumental music.