Jamin Wells

• Position: Associate Dean
• Department: College of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities
• Office Location: Building 53, Room 222
• jwells2@uwf.edu
• Campus: 850.473.7290

Biography

Dr. Jamin Wells is the Associate Dean of the College of Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities at the University of West Florida. He is an Associate Professor of History and previously directed the Public History Graduate Program. He founded the UWF Digital Humanities Lab in 2017.

Wells is committed to researching, writing, and teaching a usable past. A graduate of the Hagley Program in the History of Capitalism, Technology, and Culture at the University of Delaware, he has led numerous public history projects, including several grant-funded digital history initiatives and an oral history project that led to the publication of A Punkhouse in the Deep South: The Oral History of 309. He teaches courses in Florida history, public history, maritime and coastal history, and the occasional methods course.

His first book, Shipwrecked: Coastal Disasters and the Making of the American Beach, won the John Lyman Book Award in U.S. Maritime History. His current research examines the intersection of memory, history, and power in Pensacola, Florida, over the past two centuries. He is co-editor of the award-winning public history project Righting the Past and currently serves on the Florida State Historical Marker Council.

Degrees & Institutions

Wells has an undergraduate degree in history from the University of Rhode Island and master’s degrees from the University of Rhode Island and the University of Delaware. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Delaware where he was a fellow in the Hagley Program in Capitalism, Technology, and Culture.

Research

Wells's current book project examines the intersection of history, memory, and power in Pensacola, Florida over the last two hundred years. It tells the surprising story -- and far-ranging impacts -- of the two-century fight over the past in "America's First Settlement."

Publications

“Recognized ‘For What They Were’: The Rise and Fall of the Second Klan in the City of Five Flags,” [under review].

"Pensacola's Ku Klux Klan and T.T. Wentworth Jr.: A Preliminary Report" (2021)

Shipwrecked: Coastal Disasters and the Making of the American Beach. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020.

“Mapping the Coastal Frontier: Shipwrecks and the Cultural Landscape of the Early Republic Littoral,” in Alicia Caporaso, ed., Formation Processes of Maritime Archaeological Landscapes and Sites. Springer, 2017

Affiliations

American Historical Association

Council on Undergraduate Research

Gulf South Historical Association

National Council on Public History

North American Society for Oceanic History

Keywords: public history; maritime and coastal history; historical memory; Florida history; Pensacola, Florida