About Sharon D. Raynor, PhD

Sharon D. Raynor is the Interim Associate Vice Chancellor of Academic Affairs | Student Success and the Winnie Wood Endowed Professor of English and Digital Media at Elizabeth City State University (ECSU). Raynor is the author of Practicing Oral History with Military and War Veterans (Routledge Press 2022) and co-editor of Teaching Race in Perilous Times (SUNY Press 2021). She is the Book Review Editor of the Oral History Review (Journal of the Oral History Association - Routledge). She collaborated with the North Carolina Humanities on two community oral history projects: “Breaking the Silence: The Unspoken Brotherhood of Vietnam Veterans” and “Soldier-to-Soldier: Men and Women Share Their Legacy of War." She uses her various platforms to share veterans’ stories with communities in North Carolina. 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 and NC Museum of History. She is also a co-producer of The Silence of War, a transmedia, enhanced eBook and short film documentary in collaboration with students and faculty in The Imagination Project at Wake Forest University’s Documentary Film Program. She worked with UNC-Chapel Hill School of Education with LEARNNC: North Carolina Digital History Textbook to design lesson plans based on her oral history interviews with Vietnam Veterans and collaborated with Cardinal and Pine to document “Hidden Valor: Remembering North Carolina’s Black Veterans on Memorial Day.”   

Raynor has dedicated publications to veteran issues such as: “Breaking the Silence: The Unspoken Brotherhood of Vietnam Veterans,” “The First Saddest Day of My Life: A Vietnam War Story,” “The Double Consciousness and Disability Dilemma: Trauma and the African American Veteran,” “African American Masculinity Performance in the Diaries of Vietnam Soldiers,” “The Tell-Tale-Listener: Gendered Representations in Oral History [with Vietnam Veterans],” “Welcome Home, Brother," “’Sing a Song Heroic’: Paul Laurence Dunbar’s Mythic and Poetic Tribute to Black Soldiers,” and “Something He Couldn’t Write About: Telling My Daddy’s Story of Vietnam.” Other diverse array of scholarly publications in the areas of African American literary studies and narrative and trauma theory appear in The Oral History Review, Word and Text – A Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics, History Now (Gilder-Lehrman Institute of American History), CLCWEB: Comparative Literature and Culture, (In)Scribing Gender: International Female Writers and the Creative Process, NC Crossroads: A Publication of the North Carolina Humanities Council, disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory, We Wear the Mask: Paul Laurence Dunbar Collection, Cultural Studies/Critical Methodologies, Zadie Smith: Critical Essays, College Language Association Journal, Dos Passos Review, From Around the World: Secular Authors and Biblical Perspectives, Australian Feminist Review and The Yancy Years 1994-2008: The Age of Infrastructure, Technology & Restoration, and 27 Views of Charlotte: The Queen City in Prose and Poetry. 

She previously worked at East Carolina University, Johnson C. Smith University, Wake Forest University and the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. Raynor has been a faculty fellow for the Gilder-Lehrman Institute of American History, Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity and Gender in the Social Sciences at Duke University, Clark-Yudkin Research Fellowship for United States Air Force Academy, Humanities Writ Large Faculty Fellowship at Duke University and Center for Documentary Studies and the Alphonse Fletcher, Jr., Fellowship at the W.E. B. DuBois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University and the Faculty Resource Network Fellowship at New York University. She has participated in international faculty 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. Raynor is a North Carolina native with 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 PA. She is the 2020 recipient of the Old North State Award from the NC Governor’s Office for her continuous work in the fields education and veterans advocacy in the state of North Carolina.