Rachelle Gold

As the daughter and niece of five teachers, Dr. Rachelle Gold’s upbringing in California’s Bay Area led her to embrace her family’s tradition of becoming an educator. Born in Santa Clara and educated in the academically rigorous San Jose Unified Public School District as well as private Hebrew school, she earned her undergraduate degree in Humanities with minors in Women’s Studies and Middle Eastern Studies.

As the valedictorian of a class of 5,000 students, she graduated from San Jose State University in 1993. That summer, she attended U.C. Berkeley’s Latin Intensive Workshop to prepare to study ancient rhetoric in graduate school. She then moved to Bloomington, Indiana, to earn a Master of Arts degree in English from Indiana University, where she studied Renaissance poetry and drama and worked for two years at the Office of Scholarships and Financial Aid.

After working for four years as an assistant director of Financial Aid at Santa Clara University, she returned to the academy in 2000 to earn a California Teaching Credential for grades 7–12 English Language Arts and a second Master of Arts degree in Education at the University of California at Berkeley in the Multicultural Urban Secondary English (MUSE) program. At Cal, she studied African American Literature and deepened her interest in African American history, art, music, poetry and drama after reading all of Lorraine Hansberry’s and August Wilson’s plays. She earned an Outstanding Graduate Instructor award for teaching “Current Issues in Education,” a course that required students to learn about complex social, cultural, economic and political issues that affect K–12 education and to complete service-learning projects at local public elementary, middle and high schools. After graduating in 2002, she moved to Durham and taught First-Year Composition and African American Literature for one year at North Carolina Central University.

In 2003, she was admitted to a Ph.D. program in Education with a focus on Culture, Curriculum, and Change, and her doctoral degree was conferred in 2008 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). While there, she taught First-Year Composition I and II, Basic Writing and Summer Bridge English Composition I in the Department of English and for Project Uplift. While at UNC, she earned two teaching awards, both of which were student-nominated: the Student Undergraduate Teaching and Service Award in 2007 and the Tanner Award for Excellence in Teaching Undergraduate Students in 2008.

After graduating, she applied for a tenure-track position as an assistant professor in the Department of English at NCCU and was hired in 2008. In 2015, she was promoted to associate professor of English, and that same year, she won the Outstanding First-Year Advocate Award, the Chancellor’s Excellence in Service Award and the NCCU Award for Teaching Excellence. She is especially proud to have taught students who have become middle and high school educators in the state of North Carolina.

As a faculty member at NCCU, she has taught First-Year Composition I and II; Advanced Composition; Advanced Professional and Technical Writing; World Literature; Global Studies; Contemporary African American Literature; Junior/Senior Seminar in Trauma Literature; Women’s Literature; Women of Color in Film and Literature; Methods and Materials in Secondary English Language Arts; Integrating Reading and Writing in the Secondary English Classroom; and English Language Development for English Language Learners courses: Reading and Vocabulary, Speaking and Listening, and Writing in a Cultural Context. She coordinates the English Education Program and meets monthly with colleagues in the School of Education who train, mentor, coach, observe, certify and license student teachers.

In 2013, she and her colleague Dr. Camille Passalacqua won a National Endowment for the Humanities “Enduring Questions” grant for $33,000 to teach a seminar for two years from 2014–2016 on Trauma Literature entitled “On Survival and Healing.” The literature, film and art taught included Aristotle’s "Rhetoric," Homer’s epic poem "The Odyssey," Shakespeare’s "Hamlet," Harriet Jacobs’ "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl," Dee Brown’s "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee," Michiko Hachiya’s "Hiroshima Diary," "Auschwitz: True Tales from a Grotesque Land" by survivor Sara Nomberg-Przytyk, "The Little School: Tales of Disappearance and Survival" in Argentina by political prisoner Alicia Partnoy, Tim O’Brien’s "The Things They Carried," which is about a soldier’s perspective while serving during the Vietnam Conflict, and "Left to Tell" by Rwandan genocide survivor Immaculée Ilibagiza. The film "From Swastika to Jim Crow" was also shown, which depicted interviews with Jewish exiles in the 1930s who taught at HBCUs.

In 2020, she and her colleague Dr. Kathryn Wymer won another National Endowment for the Humanities grant for $90,000 entitled “Digital Explorations of North Carolina Central University’s History,” which will provide workshops over two summers to teach faculty how to use the digitized NCCU yearbooks and the student newspaper "The Campus Echo,"  which date back to the 1920s, to engage students with historical and archival research in Humanities classes.

In December 2022, she won a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for $500,000 for a three-year project entitled "Purpose, Persistence, and Power: Pioneering African American Women and their Fight for Racial Justice in North Carolina and Beyond." Her proposal was selected as one of 26 chosen from 280 applications to Mellon's Higher Learning Open Call of Civic Engagement and Social Justice projects. NCCU has never won a Mellon grant before, even though faculty have participated in a Mellon-funded Digital Humanities partnership with Duke’s John Hope Franklin Humanities Center from 2016–2021.

Half of the funds will go directly to undergraduate students who will be paid to read about historical, artistic, educational, legal and scientific accomplishments of African American women from the South, and particularly North Carolina. They will also learn interviewing, photography, videography, writing and archival research skills and produce oral histories that will be publicly available in an audio and visual digital archive on the NCCU server. Faculty and staff will be paid to mentor and coach the students as they create these digital humanities interviews of NCCU alumnae, who will receive honoraria. NCCU’s archivist and NCCU staff who have expertise in videography, listening, audio recording and photography will teach these skills to the students; oral historians at UNC-Chapel Hill will train the undergraduates; and graduate students at Duke will provide tutoring in various digital humanities tools. Students and faculty will visit the Durham History Hub, the Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice and the International Civil Rights Museum in Greensboro. A yearly symposium will feature a showcase of the interviews, a cash prize will be awarded for the three best interviews, and alumni, faculty, staff, students and the general public will be invited.

No humanities faculty at NCCU has ever won an award this large. It will help the College of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities recruit humanities majors, develop innovative curriculum, promote NCCU’s new Digital Humanities minor and chronicle the stories of women who have positively impacted Durham, the state and the country. While more than 75% of NCCU's graduating classes are women, only three of the thirteen Board of Trustees are women; only nine of sixty campus buildings are named for women; and only one woman has been a permanent Chancellor. The project’s goal is to rewrite the history of the university to highlight the amazing accomplishments of NCCU graduates such as Eva Clayton, the first Black woman from North Carolina to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives since 1901; Tressie McMillan Cottom, the first NCCU woman graduate to win a MacArthur “Genius” grant; comedian and actress Kim Coles; Duke University Professor of Art, painter Beverly McIver; 106-year-old Virginia District Court Judge Arenda Wright Allen; alumna Maggie Poole Bryant, Class of ’38, who was a librarian and English teacher for decades and is NCCU’s oldest living graduate; and Durham Mayor Elaine O’Neal.

Her publications include “Inspired, Illustrated, Immortalized, Imagined!: African American Social Justice Champions as Legacy Leaders” in Dynamic Activities for First-Year Composition published by the National Council of Teachers of English in 2022; “Bearing Witness: Innovations in Teaching Trauma Literature at an Historically Black University” in the Journal on Excellence in College Teaching (2021); “Beyond Carrie and Judy Blume: Teaching about Menstrual Equity and Period Poverty in the Secondary English Language Arts Classroom” in English Education, published by the National Council of Teachers of English (2020); “Lynn Nottage,” World Book Encyclopedia (2018); “Outsider Within Theory,” in The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Gender and Sexuality Studies (2016); “Ferox or Fortis: Montaigne, Hobbes, and the Perils of Paradiastole," co-authored with James Pearce; Philosophy and Rhetoric, Johns Hopkins University Press (2015); “Book review of Shakespeare and the Jews, 20th Anniversary Edition, by James Shapiro" in Renaissance Papers, (2015); “Are You Now or Have you Ever Been?: Teaching Media Literacy, Writerly Confidence, and Cultural Awareness with This I Believe” in CLASH!: Superheroic Yet Sensible Strategies for Teaching Students the New Literacies (2011); and “ ‘Education Has Spoiled Many a Good Plow Hand:’ How Beneatha’s Knowledge Functions in A Raisin in the Sun” in Reading Contemporary African American Drama: Fragments of History, Fragments of Self  (published by Peter Lang); edited by Trudier Harris and Jennifer Larson) in 2007.

Her specialties include African American literature, women’s literature and English pedagogy.
 

Education