J. David Gillespie

I am a political scientist, a graduate of Wake Forest University (B.A., M.A.) and of Kent State University (Ph.D.), a husband (over a half century of happy marriage but no children), a now-retired faculty member, (for a while) an academic administrator, and a writer. The son of missionary parents and younger brother of three male siblings who were born in China and whose father after Pearl Harbor was imprisoned in a Japanese internment camp in occupied Shanghai, I have returned three times to China as an adult. I have served on the faculties of an NC community college, of Samford University (1973-79), and for 27 years of Presbyterian College (1979-2006), during 8 of which (1997-2005) I headed Presbyterian College's academic program as VP for Academic Affairs. I once taught a summer course at Corpus Christi College of Oxford Univ., was a Fulbright Professor at The University of Tartu in Estonia, played a leading role in organizing and administering a new Dept of Political Science, spent a summer with a colleague in the West Bank doing opinion research among Palestinians, and led a home stay trip for students to Moscow and St. Petersburg. I served as President of the South Carolina Political Science Association and in 1993 was named the Carnegie-CASE SC Professor of the Year. I have written two books on U.S. third or minor parties, Politics at the Periphery (1993) and Challengers to Duopoly (2012). Retiring from Presbyterian College in 2006, I continued to teach part time at the College of Charleston and The Citadel, two public institutions in Charleston, SC. I have authored two books on the racially-motivated 2015 shooting of nine African Americans at Charleston's Mother Emanuel AME Church. They are Race Murder, Christian Forgiveness, and Revolutionary Change in Charleston (2015) and The Trial of White Nationalist Dylann Roof (2017).