The face of Carolina is changing. As large numbers of faculty retire and new faculty representing the spectrum of disciplines join the ranks, the pool of expert sources for reporters will expand. To help reporters get to know our faculty, we will highlight several faculty members each week. Create a file or visit the USC News Web site (http://uscnews.sc.edu) for additional experts and news items.

Meet three of USC's faculty who specialize in women's history:

Dr. Marjorie Spruill, an associate professor of history, specializes in U.S. women's history and the history of the South. She has written extensively on the women's suffrage movement and is researching the women's rights advocates and social conservatives of the 1970s and the role of gender issues in the right turn that American politics took late in that decade. Spruill serves on the executive council of the Southern Historical Association and is a past president of the Southern Association for Women's Historians.

Dr. Valinda Littlefield is an assistant professor of history and African-American studies. Littlefield is a scholar of the history of women, African Americans and education with an emphasis on Southern African-American women and African-American history from 1877 to the present. Littlefield and Spruill are collaborating on a two-volume collection of essays on the lives and times of South Carolina women. Her research on Southern African-American women schoolteachers during the Jim Crow era soon will be published.

Dr. Marcia Synnott, a history professor, is completing a political-social biography, "Alice Spearman Wright and Civil Rights Movement in South Carolina." Her expertise is the history of U.S. education and women, with a concentration on South Carolina. Her recent publications include an article on diversity and university admissions in Cornell Law Review and an essay on Civil Rights Organizations in the second edition of Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia. Synnott is credited as having promoted better race relations as executive director of the biracial South Carolina Council on Human Relations, a state affiliate of the Atlanta-based Southern Regional Council during the tumultuous years of 1954 - 1967.

And don't forget these recent USC faculty spotlights ...